HUNTING OLD SAMMIE
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Three years after glass and steel plunged from a morning sky, suicide bombers and IEDs kill American soldiers in Iraq. Al Qaeda kidnaps aid workers, translators, and journalists, then beheads them. In Afghanistan, the hunt for Osama bin Laden has stalled amid the caves of Tora Bora. In Ithaca, New York, Armand Terranova monitors America's wars even as he hides from them—a practice he shares unknowingly with his neighbor, Luke Robideau, who has stocked a sniper's nest in anticipation of fighting terrorists head-on. Luke and Armand have never exchanged a word and distrust each other on sight. Luke's cats and dogs roam freely and foul Armand's lawn and patio. Stalking the animals with a BB-gun, Armand feels his neighbor as a threat: an unmarried, ill-kempt big man with gray-streaked beard and ponytail who lives with his elderly mother. To Luke, Armand is a usurper, a immigrant peasant who has gotten lucky in America at Luke's expense. Armand has everything Luke can only dream of: a beautiful wife and two children, a renovated house, enough money. Luke himself depends on Mother's Social Security and siblings' checks to live in his worn-down childhood home. When small-animal excrement begins to fly across the property line, their mutual antagonism escalates into a confrontation only one man can win.
This is a moving, powerful and haunting novel about what we don't know about each other, and of what happens when we tell ourselves stories in our own minds about what we think we see—and how sadly, tragically wrong those versions of the world and of others can be. Mr. Lauricella has written an elegant, unforgettable book about the things that divide us in this lonely, Balkanized world. -- Amazon review by Ithacan
John Lauricella's Hunting Old Sammie holds appeal far beyond the environs of Cornell University and Ithaca, NY, where this reader resides. In a post-9/11 world, the story metastasizes around the disease of suspicion that pervades the relationships of spouses, neighbors, coworkers, communities, cultures and nations. Lauricella's intense writing style, exacting details, and unexpected plot twists make this novel a page-turner, but maybe not one for Grandma (unless you suspect that Grandma has a dark side!). -- Amazon review by Matt Conway
This a GREAT read! While the synopsis does a very good job of exposing the plot all the way to the end without disclosing details and spoiling it for potential readers; it DOES whet a desire to read the entire book. (It worked for me!) While vacillating between Armand and Luke, the story also brings in episodes in the lives of Luke's mother, and Armand's wife and son. While the last three people have almost nothing to do with the escalating feud between Luke and Armand, their episodes give the over-all story a depth of realism seldom experienced in literature. -- Amazon review by Dr. John T. Webb
Hunting Old Sammie is a powerful book limning a specific moment in our culture. It is dark and lyrical, artistically wrought and emotionally fraught. -- review by Tilia Klebenov for IndieReader
Hunting Old Sammie is 100% human-made: conceived, composed, and crafted by its author, John Lauricella.
"Hunting Old Sammie is a domestic drama unfolding in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its atmosphere of paranoid suspicion is partly attributable to the news media, both traditional and "irregular," which seem infinitely resourceful (and possibly creative) in keeping the update feeds fed. The novel has its autobiographical elements, yet those are, as always, less interesting than what is happening in the fictive world, and why.
"Misunderstandings drive the narrative and lead to dire results. Characters fail to know each other because they fail or not even try to communicate. One result is that next-door neighbors mutually suspect each other of being bad actors with hostile intentions, when in fact they are concerned about many of the same issues and trends and hold similar beliefs about the U.S.A., of which both are citizens. Certainly, Armand and Luke differ in other aspects of their lives; but those purely personal divergencies are only that, and do not indicate any deeper or more dangerous disparity. Neither gives himself a chance to learn any of this simply because he will not speak the first word to the man he prejudges the terrorist next-door.
"The issues that divide us today are not the ones that animate this novel, but the dynamic is the same: isolated in our respective silos, seeing only what we want to see, listening only to what we want to hear, we fail to know each other and presume the worst. Luke and Armand fight a non-violent civil war until the end, when blood is spilled — needlessly, because they are, really, on the same side."
-- John Lauricella