The Bee-Loud Glade by Steve Himmer

JC: Steve Himmer’s The Bee-Loud Glade is one of the first books released by indie press Atticus Books, which seems ready to kick in a few literary doors. I hope these books are hitting the shelves in your local bookstore, because they’re cool, different, and more than a little dangerous. If the selection of books from their first six months is any indicator of future quality, I’m going to be following their progress.

Finch, our narrator for The Bee-Loud Glade, has been Assistant to the Director of Brand Awareness at Second Nature Modern Greenery for ten years. They make fake plants. His job, or what it has evolved into, is writing dozens of blogs – creating characters, families, lives for hundreds of fictional characters – slipping into posts wherever possible the benefits and beauty of synthetic plants. One day the new Director, justifiably unclear on what exactly it is that Finch does, fires him.

He’s not particularly broken up, Finch. He doesn’t have any co-workers he likes, or even knows, or who knows him – he’s somehow gotten an unearned reputation as an intense tennis aficionado, but really can’t distinguish one amorphous colleague from another. He’ll probably miss his blog families more than any of his coworkers.

So he goes home. He has no friends, no family, so he stays inside, isolated, Watching movies like other movies he’s seen before, actresses like that other actress a few years ago. Eventually, the autopay on his bills and rent runs out. He answers spam from his email while eviction notices appear on his door. Finally, he receives a strange interview summons from eccentric billionaire Mr. Crane, and receives an offer he can’t refuse.

Crane offers Finch an obscene sum of money to become his personal garden hermit, with a few stipulations, of course. Follow instructions to the letter, wear the prescribed clothing, grow a garden, never speak. And so begins Finch’s great experiment: his total retreat from society.

I won’t go on, because this is just the beginning and it’s really worth reading on your own. Himmer invokes no one so much as Thoreau, but a post-modern HDT, thoroughly saturated with Jerzy Kosinski or Alasdair Gray. Really great stuff. I’ll bet you’ve never read anything like this before.