Compared me to Carl Hiasson, Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace, etc. WOW! (this will definitely go to my head)
Sales of my first novel Blue Rubber Pool have picked up I assume due to recent publicity about my second novel The Bird in Your Heart. Pool came out in 2018 as the publisher was losing her eyesight and I was just getting my toes wet in book writing and book publishing. I set it aside. Moved on. There were other stories anxious to be told.
A publisher of Southern Fiction and Literary Fiction held onto The Bird in Your Heart for about a year, asking me to “revise and resubmit” despite not committing to a contract. I did the work. They passed. I freaked. Ran hair-on-fire to Amazon to self-publish then decided what the hell self-publish Blue Rubber Pool also.
So it’s up there and selling again but, alas, as always, more reviews are desperately needed.
Pool is not for everyone. Not everyone gets it. People get lost in there.
It’s different than Bird.
I wondered it the two would get along beside one another on the same shelf. Would Pool mess things up for Bird?
Then I found this (from someone named Tom on Goodreads) and felt better:
Blue Rubber Pool is one of those stories that pulls you in from the beginning and lets you have a good time with the descriptions of the ways the story plays out. The first chapter gets you interested in the narrative right from the early pages and compels you to keep reading through to find out how everything will eventually come together as you get deeper into the story and nearer to the unexpected conclusion.
There is something satisfying for every kind of reader: mystery, action/adventure, surrealness, crime/heist, a little romance (though it’s not the focus), a little comedy, with some real recent historical references interspersed. Even the brief asides & cerebral observations help the reader to understand what JT is going through, the thought processes behind experiencing those events, sometimes in a kind of trippy way. If you like Carl Hiaasen, Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, etc, with more of a contemporary voice, you will find a lot to enjoy in Tim Bryant’s storytelling.