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Scorpio Rising
Scorpio Rising is the last novel by a Texas writer whose work was too often neglected during his lifetime. R. G. Vliet died just days after completing the book, and the power and majesty of his writing reflect the heightened awareness of a man resigned to his own death. But he was able to produce a novel which, in its investigation of the vagaries of time, human desire, and deformity both physical and moral, approaches the level of classical tragedy.
The novel begins as an account of displaced westerners living in a small Massachusetts city - and then mysteriously turns back to a darker time and place, a Texas ranch town at the turn of the century. Is what follows a dream, a hallucination, or the acting out of a guilt long buried? The story now centers on a headstrong young woman who yearns to escape a setting as confining as the land is open. She will involve those around her in a conspiracy whose murderous consequences reach beyond even her selfish reckoning.
Scorpio Rising is a wonderfully crafted novel; the two time periods it comprises refer back to each other in subtle and haunting ways. Vliet wrote before his death: "I'm so conscious lately of what must, apparently, be the strangeness of my novels to others (mainly strangeness of style, intensity and vision) that it has put me through a private crisis. But my vision seems to me so clear and true, the compulsive passion behind it so powerful, and my demands upon the language so necessary to me that I don't believe I can write any other way."
R. G. Vliet is a reputation waiting to be discovered, and Scorpio Rising is his final and crowning achievement.
"The tragedy of R. G. Vliet's early death is deepened by another tragedy: among American fiction writers of the twentieth century he is as good as anyone, and better than most, yet his work has not been widely read. Vliet's rendering of the physical world - the earth and its creatures, the sky and seasons - is a brilliant achievement and reason enough to buy and read this book. But his real greatness is this: with sensuous prose and masterful compression, Vliet has written a novel that is an exciting psychological and philosophical adventure. It is a masterpiece."
- Andre Dubus
The novel begins as an account of displaced westerners living in a small Massachusetts city - and then mysteriously turns back to a darker time and place, a Texas ranch town at the turn of the century. Is what follows a dream, a hallucination, or the acting out of a guilt long buried? The story now centers on a headstrong young woman who yearns to escape a setting as confining as the land is open. She will involve those around her in a conspiracy whose murderous consequences reach beyond even her selfish reckoning.
Scorpio Rising is a wonderfully crafted novel; the two time periods it comprises refer back to each other in subtle and haunting ways. Vliet wrote before his death: "I'm so conscious lately of what must, apparently, be the strangeness of my novels to others (mainly strangeness of style, intensity and vision) that it has put me through a private crisis. But my vision seems to me so clear and true, the compulsive passion behind it so powerful, and my demands upon the language so necessary to me that I don't believe I can write any other way."
R. G. Vliet is a reputation waiting to be discovered, and Scorpio Rising is his final and crowning achievement.
"The tragedy of R. G. Vliet's early death is deepened by another tragedy: among American fiction writers of the twentieth century he is as good as anyone, and better than most, yet his work has not been widely read. Vliet's rendering of the physical world - the earth and its creatures, the sky and seasons - is a brilliant achievement and reason enough to buy and read this book. But his real greatness is this: with sensuous prose and masterful compression, Vliet has written a novel that is an exciting psychological and philosophical adventure. It is a masterpiece."
- Andre Dubus
- GenresHistorical Fiction
245 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
1 person is currently reading
51 people want to read
About the author
R.G. Vliet
10 books3 followersRussell G. Vliet (1929-1984) was a playwright, novelist, and poet. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of a naval medical officer. He was educated at Southwest Texas State University and did graduate work at Yale. Vliet three times won the Texas Institute of Letters Award, twice for collections of poems and once for his novel Solitudes. In 1968 he was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in Fiction. He was the author of three collections of Poetry: Events and Celebrations (1966), The Man with the Black Mouth (1970), and Water and Stone (1980). Vliet died in May of 1984, in North Adams, Massachusetts, just days after completing his final novel, Scorpio Rising.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 10 reviews
March 2, 2023
I won't pretend to be smart enough to have fully understood this, but I do know it's at least on par with similarly-themed novels I've read by Cormac McCarthy and William Gay, and every bit as beautifully written, though for some reason not nearly as revered today as those authors' works. It's historical fiction with a Southern Gothic flair, along with a bit of weirdness and possible time travel (?) thrown in for good measure.
Shifting between three different time periods -- 1976, 1907, and 1904 -- this has all the murder, revenge, and tragedy that fans of those aforementioned writers could want. I very nearly rated this 5 stars, but I think a reread is in order in the near future so that I can fully absorb the various concepts concerning how the sins of a family's distant past affect future generations down through the ages.
The great novels really do be like that sometimes.
(Thanks to Jordan West for the rec.)
Shifting between three different time periods -- 1976, 1907, and 1904 -- this has all the murder, revenge, and tragedy that fans of those aforementioned writers could want. I very nearly rated this 5 stars, but I think a reread is in order in the near future so that I can fully absorb the various concepts concerning how the sins of a family's distant past affect future generations down through the ages.
The great novels really do be like that sometimes.
(Thanks to Jordan West for the rec.)
July 7, 2012
Imagine, you are going on a walk with someone you have just met, someone who has offered, with shy graciousness, to show you around the place. At first X is polite, almost formal with elaborate pleasantries. But you begin to sense something amiss. On closer inspection your guide is obviously deformed in some way and you begin to detect a bitterness,some seething emotional upheaval held back by superhuman effort; and your unease at the ironic tone of your guide turns to alarm when all of a sudden you find yourself thrust down a well,shuttling between bewildering realities,pulled back in time, your guide hasn't even been born.
This is the experience of reading this powerful book.
Where is the narrator? RGV skitters and slithers throughout the emotional landmines of his characters,presented from all angles, until the reader is completely tangled,and if, at conclusion, all is not revealed, we are left with the material to fill in the dark gaps.
Catherine only vaguely senses something beyond the narrow confines of her village life. Willfull and spoiled, she is an emotional storm, steadfast only in her longing, her interest latching on to any possibility of escape from the limitations that squeeze her so relentlessly sometimes she can hardly breathe. Her impatience for life has her reflecting often on death,and many crucial scenes are enacted at the local cemetary. As she waits there for her chosen one,frantic with uncertainty, she reflects " The dead don't have anything to fret them, they don't cry, they don't hurt, they don't know the awful feeling of love." p198
But the dead have their offspring, and take up the handed down emotional burdens that they do not understand they have inherited along with their share of anscestral genes. RGV expresses all this with subtle tour de force, and at the end of the book, when we have been set free from the well of despair and found no trace of our guide, our narrator abrubtly finished with his writing before we are ready to be released from his spell, we are limp with astonishment that we are here at all.
As Catherine concludes: Anyways it's all just some kind of dream....
This is the experience of reading this powerful book.
Where is the narrator? RGV skitters and slithers throughout the emotional landmines of his characters,presented from all angles, until the reader is completely tangled,and if, at conclusion, all is not revealed, we are left with the material to fill in the dark gaps.
Catherine only vaguely senses something beyond the narrow confines of her village life. Willfull and spoiled, she is an emotional storm, steadfast only in her longing, her interest latching on to any possibility of escape from the limitations that squeeze her so relentlessly sometimes she can hardly breathe. Her impatience for life has her reflecting often on death,and many crucial scenes are enacted at the local cemetary. As she waits there for her chosen one,frantic with uncertainty, she reflects " The dead don't have anything to fret them, they don't cry, they don't hurt, they don't know the awful feeling of love." p198
But the dead have their offspring, and take up the handed down emotional burdens that they do not understand they have inherited along with their share of anscestral genes. RGV expresses all this with subtle tour de force, and at the end of the book, when we have been set free from the well of despair and found no trace of our guide, our narrator abrubtly finished with his writing before we are ready to be released from his spell, we are limp with astonishment that we are here at all.
As Catherine concludes: Anyways it's all just some kind of dream....
Read
February 14, 2017Glum lovelorn guy goes time-traveling. I'm guessing it was the pain medication. Did not finish at page 122.
December 7, 2011
One of my favorite books of all time. An author who finds his experimental voice right before his death. I have always enjoyed mixed fiction like this combining the view of Flannery O'Connor with the misanthropy of Phillip K. Dick.
March 17, 2021
Scorpio Rising is my second Vliet novel, my first exposure being his novel Soledad (aka The Solitudes), a spare and resonant novel of a fated rendezvous of strangers in Alto Springs, Texas, in the 1880s. That novel has lingered with me, and I mull over its arresting queerness, how it appears to be a novel of crime and redemption, a la Dostoyevsky, but also appears to entail a dark divinity that guides the principal character to murder a man and then to deliver the news to his daughter, actions that make as little sense to him as they do the reader. It’s in this depiction of forces that subvert and arrogate/hijack the characters’ wills that I find fascinating. Are these the eruptions of irrational passions (a naturalistic reading) or do they arise out of some providence that makes an agent of the character to fulfill a larger design (the providential/religious/spiritual reading)? In either case, the story is so well told—with a poetic economy that renders settings vividly and yet swathes meaning and motivation with ambiguity—that there’s no sure way of knowing which way Vliet wants us to lean.
This same grey twilight of the soul is pondered again in Scorpio Rising, and the principal character becomes an agent of actions that precipitate ruin, but at the same time assure his future existence. While the main character in Soledad was subject to seizures, the principal in Scorpio Rising is a twisted hunchback who wears a four-inch platform on one foot to keep his torso aligned. These appear to be God’s chosen ones. Rudy Earl Castleberry tells us how he is living in a small town in rural Massachusetts in 1976, a self-exiled Texan, mid- to late-20s, working at an office and paper supply store. He’s a good, indefatigable worker, and his good humor makes him well liked, but he’s neck-deep in unrequited love for a single, hippie-ish mother Lita who enjoys his company and especially his fondness for her young daughter Pearl. As Rudy describes his tolerable present life, he also adverts to more painful incidents and to his faltering social life in Alto Springs, after his back began to twist him up. He tells us of the cemetery’s separate family plot, which holds five graves from the Castleberry family, founding figures in Alto Springs’ growth. It’s these gravestones that begin to limn a lineage that will by novel’s end confirm an endless cycle.
At the end of this first section—when he’s left West Hesper, traveling by train back to Alto Springs, to forget his heartbreak over Lita’s continued failure to perceive him as a potential beau—Rudy finds himself stranded in Houston in the year 1902.
The second section of the novel is a portrait of Rudy’s great grandfather’s second wife, Velma, stepmother to Rudy’s grandmother, Victoria Ann Castleberry. In telling the lonely, stunted life of Velma in 1907, there is further description of the already twisted strands of the Castleberry lineage, and presentiments of events that will figure in the novel’s third section, set in 1904. Vliet also contrives to fetch up some clues about what has happened to Rudy in Velma’s interior-monologue account of events that lead to Victoria Ann’s death by TB and her adoption of Victoria Ann’s son, Earl Leroy.
The novel’s longest section describes privileged 18-year-old Victoria Ann, pretty, intelligent, and spoiled by novels (and her father) to crave romance and passions that are scarce in the seat of fictional mid-state Balcones county. There are echoes of the self-centered hippie-ish Lita in descriptions of Victoria Ann, and ultimately it is this similarity that attracts and warps Junior Luckett, Mr. Alton Castleberry’s right-hand man at the Castleberry general store. Even while engaged to young ambitious farmer Carson Gilstrap, Victoria Ann falls headlong for a Senator St. Clair’s son, Earl Leroy. While always having loathed Junior Luckett, Victoria Ann asks him the favor of killing her fiancé. Luckett grabs at the chance to be intimate with Victoria Ann, and after the murder—even as Victoria Ann makes plans to marry Earl Leroy—he extorts sex from her. Succumbing to self-loathing and guilt, Victoria Ann ends by relinquishes herself willingly to Luckett over the next few weeks. They are discovered in flagrante by the murdered fiancé’s suspicious brothers and Mr. Castleberry.
In the novel’s final section, merely three pages long, the Gilstrap brothers are trying to take Junior Luckett back to their town for justice, but Luckett provokes them into killing him, and they smash his skull and drown him in the Nueces River.
This novel is Vliet’s Sound and the Fury, a tale of a family’s cursed lineage, a twisted Möbius strip. Like Sound and Fury, Scorpio Rising’s narrative is fragmented into several stories about different characters and time periods, each of them overlapping and/or echoing each other. The fragments arrange themselves chronologically quite well, but as with the Möbius strip, there is the mysterious twist in the story that somehow, forever, brings Rudy Earl Castleberry back to his family’s dark beginnings, and to the unmarked grave in the family cemetery dug eight-feet deep, “a little closer to Hell than all the rest.” This is a near-perfect novel in its construction, with its several back and forths across the sections. While its ultimate meaning is more sensation than sense, there is at its heart the unnerving eeriness of observing the fate of sad Rudy Earl transformed into the lurking malignancy of Junior Luckett.
This same grey twilight of the soul is pondered again in Scorpio Rising, and the principal character becomes an agent of actions that precipitate ruin, but at the same time assure his future existence. While the main character in Soledad was subject to seizures, the principal in Scorpio Rising is a twisted hunchback who wears a four-inch platform on one foot to keep his torso aligned. These appear to be God’s chosen ones. Rudy Earl Castleberry tells us how he is living in a small town in rural Massachusetts in 1976, a self-exiled Texan, mid- to late-20s, working at an office and paper supply store. He’s a good, indefatigable worker, and his good humor makes him well liked, but he’s neck-deep in unrequited love for a single, hippie-ish mother Lita who enjoys his company and especially his fondness for her young daughter Pearl. As Rudy describes his tolerable present life, he also adverts to more painful incidents and to his faltering social life in Alto Springs, after his back began to twist him up. He tells us of the cemetery’s separate family plot, which holds five graves from the Castleberry family, founding figures in Alto Springs’ growth. It’s these gravestones that begin to limn a lineage that will by novel’s end confirm an endless cycle.
At the end of this first section—when he’s left West Hesper, traveling by train back to Alto Springs, to forget his heartbreak over Lita’s continued failure to perceive him as a potential beau—Rudy finds himself stranded in Houston in the year 1902.
The second section of the novel is a portrait of Rudy’s great grandfather’s second wife, Velma, stepmother to Rudy’s grandmother, Victoria Ann Castleberry. In telling the lonely, stunted life of Velma in 1907, there is further description of the already twisted strands of the Castleberry lineage, and presentiments of events that will figure in the novel’s third section, set in 1904. Vliet also contrives to fetch up some clues about what has happened to Rudy in Velma’s interior-monologue account of events that lead to Victoria Ann’s death by TB and her adoption of Victoria Ann’s son, Earl Leroy.
The novel’s longest section describes privileged 18-year-old Victoria Ann, pretty, intelligent, and spoiled by novels (and her father) to crave romance and passions that are scarce in the seat of fictional mid-state Balcones county. There are echoes of the self-centered hippie-ish Lita in descriptions of Victoria Ann, and ultimately it is this similarity that attracts and warps Junior Luckett, Mr. Alton Castleberry’s right-hand man at the Castleberry general store. Even while engaged to young ambitious farmer Carson Gilstrap, Victoria Ann falls headlong for a Senator St. Clair’s son, Earl Leroy. While always having loathed Junior Luckett, Victoria Ann asks him the favor of killing her fiancé. Luckett grabs at the chance to be intimate with Victoria Ann, and after the murder—even as Victoria Ann makes plans to marry Earl Leroy—he extorts sex from her. Succumbing to self-loathing and guilt, Victoria Ann ends by relinquishes herself willingly to Luckett over the next few weeks. They are discovered in flagrante by the murdered fiancé’s suspicious brothers and Mr. Castleberry.
In the novel’s final section, merely three pages long, the Gilstrap brothers are trying to take Junior Luckett back to their town for justice, but Luckett provokes them into killing him, and they smash his skull and drown him in the Nueces River.
This novel is Vliet’s Sound and the Fury, a tale of a family’s cursed lineage, a twisted Möbius strip. Like Sound and Fury, Scorpio Rising’s narrative is fragmented into several stories about different characters and time periods, each of them overlapping and/or echoing each other. The fragments arrange themselves chronologically quite well, but as with the Möbius strip, there is the mysterious twist in the story that somehow, forever, brings Rudy Earl Castleberry back to his family’s dark beginnings, and to the unmarked grave in the family cemetery dug eight-feet deep, “a little closer to Hell than all the rest.” This is a near-perfect novel in its construction, with its several back and forths across the sections. While its ultimate meaning is more sensation than sense, there is at its heart the unnerving eeriness of observing the fate of sad Rudy Earl transformed into the lurking malignancy of Junior Luckett.
December 18, 2024
I read this book back in 1988. Then I promptly forgot the name, author, and most of the plot. I have been searching for the title for about 8 years and recently found it. (Thanks to the What's the Name of that Book Group here on Goodreads). Then I had to read it again, mostly because my description of it was so far off. LOL
I remembered a coin that I thought was gold but turned out to be a silver dollar. I remember the main character (Rudy) was disliked but I had no recollection of why (his deformity). I thought the book ended with the time travel to the past, which ended up being way off since it mostly takes place in the early 1900's. And the time travel is closer to the beginning.
Having read it again I realize why I couldn’t remember any of it. While the premise of the story is good the actual book was TORTURE to read. And truthfully, I skimmed a lot this time.
Here is the spoiler of this review:
The big spoiler was all I remembered, but I don’t feel like it was a spoiler really. In the 1976 section (at the beginning) Rudy does say that the unmarked grave contains his grandfather. He just didn’t know that he was his own grandpa.
I remembered a coin that I thought was gold but turned out to be a silver dollar. I remember the main character (Rudy) was disliked but I had no recollection of why (his deformity). I thought the book ended with the time travel to the past, which ended up being way off since it mostly takes place in the early 1900's. And the time travel is closer to the beginning.
Having read it again I realize why I couldn’t remember any of it. While the premise of the story is good the actual book was TORTURE to read. And truthfully, I skimmed a lot this time.
Here is the spoiler of this review:
The big spoiler was all I remembered, but I don’t feel like it was a spoiler really. In the 1976 section (at the beginning) Rudy does say that the unmarked grave contains his grandfather. He just didn’t know that he was his own grandpa.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 20, 2018
I enjoyed this story, but felt let down when I finished. I enjoyed the first part of the story which takes place in New England in 1976. The characters are interesting as are the relationships. The 2nd part of the book goes back a generation to Texas in 1904 & 1907. This section started slow for me, a bit too experimental at it's start, but then it took off. It was intriguing to find out how the author brought the two generational stories together. The author’s writing is superb. I doubt there are any wasted or excessive words. His descriptive writing puts the reader in the distinctive time and place; the dialogue internal reflections not only ring true but also give distinctive voice to the characters. What I did not like, what made me feel let down was not completing the story of Rudy, the central character in the 1976 section. I found Rudy a strong, interesting character and I wanted the story to swing back to him after the Texas section.
September 5, 2014
An interesting little find (The Strand, $1 shelf outside) which I'm glad I picked up. You can tell the novelist was a poet, he plays with time and structure in an original way which is interesting if at times difficult to follow. Two stories, really, balancing suspense and longing with creepiness and the ordinary. Traces how one generation flows into the next, even unwittingly, with secrets and connections buried but still impacting the present. There's a bit too much star-gazing scenes (like the title) which didn't add a lot, and the segue from 1970s to 1900s was curious and I didn't quite get it, but the plot was well formed and characters richly carved out of great Texan/regional material. You end up "re-skimming" the first half of the book once you get to the end to put it all back together.
October 13, 2013
So glad I came across this book in a best of Texas list.
Fascinating, unique, and very pretty writing about ugly things.
Fascinating, unique, and very pretty writing about ugly things.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 10 reviews