Ursula Pflug's Blog - Posts Tagged "nyc"

Dust Devil on a Quiet Street by Richard Bowes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Richard Bowes died on Christmas Eve. I'd never heard of him but author, editor and critic Matthew Cheney mentioned his "speculative memoirs" and that was enough to send me looking. Dust Devil on a Quiet Street describes decades in the east and west villages where I lived for a year in the late 70s. We never met, not then and not at SF Conventions later on, in spite of the delightful wasted hours we each spent as part of the passing parade in Washington Square and Tompkins Square Park. Bowes was a wild kid too and cleaned up just in time, settling into a job at the library at NYU where he wrote urban fantasy novels but Dust Devil is so much more. Bowes witnessed the Stonewall Riots and the fall of the towers. The Hole in The City, his story about 9/11, included here, is still read on public radio every year. I've been reading and writing more memoir for a few years now, most unpublished and now suspect that without fictional and speculative elements I'm not at my most truthful. Bowes' "speculative memoir" inspires as it shows a way forward. Hospital ghosts, murderous love triangles, telepathic performance poets, the constant intrigue of street level east village antics as artists, writers and critics rub shoulders with drug dealers and narcs, inspiring work that will make their names if their habit or their sugar daddy doesn't get them first. His prose is gorgeous as he describes not just lovers and lifelong friends but the otherworldly characters he met during drug and anesthesia hallucinations, some of whom followed him through life and if he wasn't so sane he might have wondered more than he did if he was crazy. He writes about the street and about overlapping realities with courage, curiosity and intelligence and we are the richer for it. A kindred spirit, a time traveler, who took the time ten years ago to give us this book and I'm more than grateful for it. Safe travels, Richard. Highly recommend. #bookstagrammer #urbanfantasy #bookreviews #richardbowes #writerscommunity



View all my reviews
Dust Devil on a Quiet Street