Jane Bradley died this week. I was a fan of hers. I knew her a little bit. I got to spend a day with her when she read at a N@B event I hosted and she let me know when she returned to St. Louis another time for a conference and we spent a nice evening at a bar talking about all the things. She wanted to help me get some respectability and I very badly wanted to read her current work in progress, a novel she was calling The Snow Queen of Atlanta which sounded awesome.
It sounded awesome because I'd already published a selection from it as a short story titled The One Good Thing in Noir at the Bar Volume 2. If you were on the ball enough to score a copy of that book and read it, Jane's story was almost assuredly among your favorites and if it wasn't fucking go read that shit again - clearly you missed something. Though fiction it felt realer than most memoirs I've read. The characters and places were built from solid material. The ugly baggage and staggering beauty were earned awfully and wrought honestly.
I don't know if she ever finished The Snow Queen of Atlanta, but she left behind a body of work full of the same qualities The One Good Thing promised. Below is something I wrote about her novel You Believers for another website in 2011.
**************************** reprint **************************
Is there anything more devastating than the loss a loved one? Perhaps the uncertainty of the loss of a loved one is worse; the terrible not knowing what has happened, and being plagued by a multitude of awful imaginings. I think of the psychological torture the characters in Tim Krabbe's The Golden Egg (also made into the haunting film The Vanishing) or William Gay's short story The Paperhanger or Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Pledge, (again a good film with the same name directed by Sean Penn and Starring Jack Nicholson) suffered and pray I never know it from the inside.
Shelby Waters knows first hand what it's like. Years after the disappearance of her sister Darly she has started the Rescue Effort Volunteers, (REV) and taken on the responsibility of searching for the missing and helping the loved ones of those gone to live again. When a young woman named Katy Connor goes missing, Shelby is called upon to help put together what's happened. You Believers by Jane Bradley is, in Shelby's words, "Katy's story. At least I think it's Katy's story. It's hard to say sometimes where one woman's story ends and another begins," and it features just about the most devastating opening paragraph I've ever read. Warning: if you pick it up and sample that opening, you, like me, won't be able to stop.
And while it's not what I'd call a feel-good story, a neat and tidy mystery or even a pulse-pounding thriller, it packs more feeling, mystery and pulse raising to potential coronary levels than you have any reasonable right to expect from one book. Sure, it's emotionally loaded material that any hack can exploit for instant intensity, (and in the hands of a lesser writer that's exactly what you'd have here), but Bradley has gone far beyond the broad side of barns and nailed her target so precisely, (with character, with empathy and the space to soak it in) I hope never to be caught in her crosshairs. Let me be clear here too - You Believers is not an endless bummer of a novel. The warmth and human kinship found in the pages would bring me around for seconds in a heartbeat.
"I'm trying to tell you the story, but to give you the story would be like giving you the churning blue sea one bucket at a time. You might taste the salt, feel the cold, but the weight and wave of so much water, well, it's lost."
**************************************************************
It's been a couple years since I last talked with Jane, but I think about her often. I recommend You Believers any time someone is looking for gems they probably missed and I'd check trade journals for news of The Snow Queen of Atlanta, but as someone with their own long-overdue novel, I quit nagging her about it long ago. Her story collections Are We Lucky Yet? and Power Lines are still available (Power Lines might only be available as an e-book now).