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Voices after Evelyn
Voices after Evelyn seeks not so much to dig up a cold case—the 1953 disappearance of La Crosse, Wisconsin, babysitter Evelyn Hartley—as reopen its heart. A fugue of voices across time (cracked, offensive, profound) reverberating toward today, when the phantoms of so-called innocence and greatness grow scarier than anything that took Evelyn away. An unsolved crime that jaundiced the way a town saw itself and its relationship to the outside world is rendered into a polyphonic, farcical, yet accurate visitation to the 1950s Midwest, where banality and inspired caprice make for an odd mix of the hilarious and terrifying.
264 pages, Hardcover
Published October 5, 2018
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146 people want to read
About the author
Rick Harsch
21 books295 followersPublisher, chief editor of corona\samizdat press; Izola, Slovenia....www.corona\samizdat press; rick.harsch@gmail.com
The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, a novel;
and
Walk Like a Duck, a Season of Little League Baseball in Italy
As of April 24, 2020, these two books are available in a world edition from corona/samizdat, as explained in the following youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4JUl...
I have finished a two volume anthological novel, The Assassination of Olof Palme, a an anthological novel, which involves the contributions of at least 50 writers from about 20 countries, and extracts the fungus of the Reagan years, montagerates the murderous manners of secretive Nato/CIA folk in Post WWII Europe, particularly in Italy and France, pays some attention to the Assassination of Olof Palme, while exploring a sort of alternative notion of the autobiographical novel and putting an end to proofreading.
Skulls of Istria, published by River Boat Books, June 26, 2018
Not available on Amazon, only direct from:
http://www.riverboatbooks.com/our-books
Voices After Evelyn was published by Maintenance Ends Press, the Avant Garde wing of Ice Cube Press, in November of 2018
This novel is available at 19.95, from http://www.icecubepress.com/
Author of three novels published by Steerforth press:
The Driftless Zone
Billy Verite
The Sleep of Aborigines
[The Driftless Trilogy]
These three were published in translation in France, two were subsequently chosen for mass market publication and I received a copy of each before the press went bankrupt.
Author of a chapter in Creative Nonfiction's Anatomy of Baseball, prefaced by Yogi Berra.
Living now in Slovenia, where Amalietti&Amalietti of Ljubljana has published:
Several of my own novels have now been published by corona\samizdat, along with works by
Chandler Brossard
David Vardeman
Vesna Radić
Jeff Bursey
Bori Praper,
and coming soon
WD Clarke
Joao Reis
Mark Douglas
Phillip Freedenberg (with Jeff Walton)
Jomme Keller
Giuliano Vivaldi (with a co-translator)
Roberto Alt
Prasenjit Gupta
Zachary Tanner
and more
Arjun and the Good Snake (memoir)
and, in Slovene:
Arjun in dobra kača
and the novels:
Kramberger z opico (Kramberger with Monkey)
Adriatica Deserta
Istrske Lobanje (The Skulls of Istria)
2019:the novel Voices after Evelyn by a new imprint of Ice Cube Press (Iowa)
here is a review by Chris Via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NISsr...
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April 8, 2023Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NISsr...
January 4, 2019
Voices After Evelyn is a film noir masterpiece set in Wisconsin. It explores a 65 year-old cold case, but the book is not trying to shed light on this stranger-than-fiction true story. Instead, author Rick Harsch focuses on the tragic aspects of the murder of Evelyn, the tragedy that befell those who knew her, the tragedy that embraced the town where the murder too place, the tragedy that follows all those connected with the case. In this respect, Harsch is giving us a Greek tragedy, complete with a chorus of voices, that allows us glimpses of what it means to be human in a small town in the Mid-West in 1955. In addition, Harsch captures the idiomatic nuance of Mid-Western speak. His use of language in fact drives the novel forward. Once you start reading Voices After Evelyn you can’t stop.
July 18, 2022
1953 Wisconsin: the Braves moved from Boston to the newly-built Milwaukee County Stadium and finished second to the Brooklyn Dodgers, Alan Ameche was named MVP for the Badgers Football Team, Brewery Workers No.9 struck six Milwaukee breweries . . . and 15-year old Evelyn Hartley is abducted on 24 October while babysitting for professor Viggo Rasmussen in La Crosse, a crime that remains unsolved. In the fifties we thought we were immune from such madness. The town I grew up in on the other side of the state from La Crosse, where the glacier shaped the land, was then one-tenth the size of La Crosse's 47,000: my parents didn't lock our doors, we had no such fears. The echo of Evelyn's abduction hadn't yet reached us. But the decade was only getting started – Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield (population 680) was doing his wet work in 1957, and the Clutter family was wiped out in a rural Kansas hamlet (population 200) two years later. Not that so-called middle America had ever been immune from evil: it was always there, in the soil, hidden in the basements, the barns, the bars, the whore houses, behind closed doors of the quiet neighbors down the block.
Author Rick Harsch eavesdrops on those voices after Evelyn's disappearance, the friends, others victimized in silence, the barflies, the admirers, the haters, the tramps, the hoodlums and bad actors – that melting pot of midwest humanity from which, every now and again, evil can emerge.
Some talk about Evelyn, most do not, simply going about their lives on the periphery of this mystery. Hovering over the voices throughout the novel, though, is the ghostly presence of Evelyn. And the reader is compelled to wonder – is there the voice of a killer among them?
Beautifully crafted and highly recommended.
Author Rick Harsch eavesdrops on those voices after Evelyn's disappearance, the friends, others victimized in silence, the barflies, the admirers, the haters, the tramps, the hoodlums and bad actors – that melting pot of midwest humanity from which, every now and again, evil can emerge.
Some talk about Evelyn, most do not, simply going about their lives on the periphery of this mystery. Hovering over the voices throughout the novel, though, is the ghostly presence of Evelyn. And the reader is compelled to wonder – is there the voice of a killer among them?
Beautifully crafted and highly recommended.
August 16, 2020
Rick Harsch's Voices After Evelyn has been described as a sort of dark, madcap Midwestern noir. This is all true, and bits of Truman Capote and Twin Peaks echo throughout the novel. Harsch is virtuosic and has no trouble carefully employing these themes and styles as he spins his polyphonic web.
I found the wonderful dimensionality of Voices After Evelyn stemming from the exploration of authenticity (or the lack of it) and innocence (or the lack of it). It is obvious that Harsch has spent time in the Midwest; he knows that communities are often constructed on superficialities and nothing is as rosy as it seems. Harsch pulls up the grass and divulges to us the odious undercurrents running through La Crosse. The crime itself represents a collective loss of authenticity for La Crosse – this sleepy community nestled in the bluffs of Wisconsin's Driftless region is not as innocent as its inhabitants thought and out of this revelation grows a dark, collective guilt. Harsch utilizes a yammering chorus that speaks to this collective guilt, revealing a community desperately trying to make sense of an unbelievable, inexplicable crime with off-the-wall conspiracies and explanations.
Perhaps the entirety of La Crosse's character is captured in the arc of Veronica Slade. Veronica is a sort of Siren, hauntingly beautiful and mystic. She's described as lightning and, "more than human." Steve, one of her scorned lovers who loses touch with reality following his relationship with Veronica, bitterly says, "there are dimensions we don't understand contained in her." In an epic bar fight climax that's ugly and nausea-inducing, Veronica brawls with another woman in front of a voyeuristic bar crowd. When Veronica loses the fight and lays bloodied, beaten, and half naked on the bar floor, we see on full display a powerful allusion to Evelyn Hartley's murder and (at best) the haplessness or (at worst) the complicity of an entire community.
This is a rich book and much could be written exploring various characters, ideas, and messages. Parts of the novel are written with white hot sexuality and lasciviousness, for one thing. Importantly, though, Harsch offers La Crosse (and, in a way, all of us) no redemption. As Steve notes while he rages about the sanctimony of the community in the aftermath of Evelyn's disappearance: "everybody is fucking guilty."
I found the wonderful dimensionality of Voices After Evelyn stemming from the exploration of authenticity (or the lack of it) and innocence (or the lack of it). It is obvious that Harsch has spent time in the Midwest; he knows that communities are often constructed on superficialities and nothing is as rosy as it seems. Harsch pulls up the grass and divulges to us the odious undercurrents running through La Crosse. The crime itself represents a collective loss of authenticity for La Crosse – this sleepy community nestled in the bluffs of Wisconsin's Driftless region is not as innocent as its inhabitants thought and out of this revelation grows a dark, collective guilt. Harsch utilizes a yammering chorus that speaks to this collective guilt, revealing a community desperately trying to make sense of an unbelievable, inexplicable crime with off-the-wall conspiracies and explanations.
Perhaps the entirety of La Crosse's character is captured in the arc of Veronica Slade. Veronica is a sort of Siren, hauntingly beautiful and mystic. She's described as lightning and, "more than human." Steve, one of her scorned lovers who loses touch with reality following his relationship with Veronica, bitterly says, "there are dimensions we don't understand contained in her." In an epic bar fight climax that's ugly and nausea-inducing, Veronica brawls with another woman in front of a voyeuristic bar crowd. When Veronica loses the fight and lays bloodied, beaten, and half naked on the bar floor, we see on full display a powerful allusion to Evelyn Hartley's murder and (at best) the haplessness or (at worst) the complicity of an entire community.
This is a rich book and much could be written exploring various characters, ideas, and messages. Parts of the novel are written with white hot sexuality and lasciviousness, for one thing. Importantly, though, Harsch offers La Crosse (and, in a way, all of us) no redemption. As Steve notes while he rages about the sanctimony of the community in the aftermath of Evelyn's disappearance: "everybody is fucking guilty."
October 1, 2023
I went into this book knowing nothing about Evelyn. And I finished the book still knowing nothing. I guess I need a history primer because I can't see how this book is about Evelyn at all, fictionalized or not. Most of the characters (I'm not even sure if they are based on real people) don't have very distinct voices and they don't spend a lot of time talking about the case so it's hard to separate them by their feeling about what happened. Many of them never even met her. I didn't know how anyone related to each other and why I should care about their lives (I know it's lame to ask for a cast of characters at the beginning but it would have been really helpful). People in town were mentioned before we even met them like we should know who they are. We weren't even presented what's know about Evelyn's case in a logical way. I can respect that this is a fragmented, nonlinear, mosaic rather than a traditionally formatted novel (I loved Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder), but the formatting isn't even consistent. Did an editor really sign off on the first chorus section (pgs. 13-18)? The punctuation and run on sentences are nightmarish. The worst is probably this line on page 17 (yes, this is exactly how it is written, commas and capitalization in all)
"..., wasn't he the one who first found her missing?, but why, why daddy?, because the little slut was pregnant,..."
The section on pgs 86 & 87 where the chorus lines are organized more like a poem feel much truer to the Greek chorus inspiration and was actually readable. They should have all been organized in that way. I also don't get why everything the judge said was bolded. It seemed like a stretch to assume it was inspired by Terry Pratchett and his use of all caps for Death. Maybe those are all real quotes from the real life judge that handled the case? But I think the worst thing that really turned me off from this book was the sexually charged descriptiond of women, including Evelyn. Most of the characters are men and the way they talk about women are uncomfortable. Any of the female victims of crimes are described vagina first, with an uncomfortable amount of focus. We got a description of Evelyn's vulva but I don't think we get told her hair color. At least the relationship between a 30 year old man and a 15 highschool girl was called out as creepy, but we still get a full sex scene of the two (from his perspective, but we do get a section from her right after where she talks about what a slut she is and goes over other guys she's fucked in a way that doesn't sound like it's coming from a 15-year old girl at all). I know noir is notorious for poorly written female characters, but that doesn't mean a random highschool girl who's one line of dialogue is prefaced by her getting described as a "dark, languid sluttrix" (pg. 83). I think the worst was in the middle of a description of a woman on woman bar fight, all action was stopped so a guy could go on for a whole paragraph about boobs, with a completely unprompted homage to nipple play. It makes me question once again why we are hearing from these specific characters that are majority men who didn't know Evelyn and spend their time leering at the remaining living women in town. I'm not going to get into the casual racism (I know this is set in the early 50s) but do note it's there. Next time, I think I'll listen to a true crime podcast on the case and leave this book on the shelf.
"..., wasn't he the one who first found her missing?, but why, why daddy?, because the little slut was pregnant,..."
The section on pgs 86 & 87 where the chorus lines are organized more like a poem feel much truer to the Greek chorus inspiration and was actually readable. They should have all been organized in that way. I also don't get why everything the judge said was bolded. It seemed like a stretch to assume it was inspired by Terry Pratchett and his use of all caps for Death. Maybe those are all real quotes from the real life judge that handled the case? But I think the worst thing that really turned me off from this book was the sexually charged descriptiond of women, including Evelyn. Most of the characters are men and the way they talk about women are uncomfortable. Any of the female victims of crimes are described vagina first, with an uncomfortable amount of focus. We got a description of Evelyn's vulva but I don't think we get told her hair color. At least the relationship between a 30 year old man and a 15 highschool girl was called out as creepy, but we still get a full sex scene of the two (from his perspective, but we do get a section from her right after where she talks about what a slut she is and goes over other guys she's fucked in a way that doesn't sound like it's coming from a 15-year old girl at all). I know noir is notorious for poorly written female characters, but that doesn't mean a random highschool girl who's one line of dialogue is prefaced by her getting described as a "dark, languid sluttrix" (pg. 83). I think the worst was in the middle of a description of a woman on woman bar fight, all action was stopped so a guy could go on for a whole paragraph about boobs, with a completely unprompted homage to nipple play. It makes me question once again why we are hearing from these specific characters that are majority men who didn't know Evelyn and spend their time leering at the remaining living women in town. I'm not going to get into the casual racism (I know this is set in the early 50s) but do note it's there. Next time, I think I'll listen to a true crime podcast on the case and leave this book on the shelf.
November 27, 2018
Got this book expecting some answers to a 65 year old cold case disappearance from western Wisconsin. Instead this is “noir” fiction told in different voices of individuals who “might have interacted” with law enforcement, Evelyn herself, or friends/family. Disappointing treatment of the unsolved mystery—definitely didn’t shed any new light on it.
March 13, 2021
A noir comedic romp through 1950s LaCrosse, Wisconsin, presented as a collage. Lots of bars and alcoholics and lonely sex-obsessed folks. You could tell the author was having lots of fun writing it. The sense of place and time was strong, and that's what I liked the most about it.
November 28, 2025
At times lyrical, at times confusing. Best book about La Crosse since "Falling Through The Earth."
July 31, 2024
Voices After Evelyn is based on a real cold case in Wisconsin from 1953. What starts as an alternative noir blooms into something more fascinating, disturbing and profound. If you're looking for the killer while reading this, you won't find them. If you're a fan of David Lynch, especially Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, you will feel right at home here. The novel's atmosphere also reminded me of the 1983 film Last Night at the Alamo. Don’t miss out on this one when ordering your next set of corona/samizdat books.
The novel follows a cast of characters from the night of the crime and it’s aftermath. The non-linear and first-person narrative Harsch uses creates this remarkable dizzying effect that plunges the reader into the minds of these small-town residents. We explore this town and the crime through their eyes. The vignette style is used beautifully here, and the little dashes of stream of consciousness only add to the reading experience. If Harsch wasn't such a talented and imaginative writer, a book like this would be boring, trite and downright terrible. It's explosive and transgressive in style and subject.
It's safe to say I like Harsch's version of Americana. In this book, he gives voice (oh boy) to the fringe members of society, for better or worse. For me, Voices After Evelyn can also be seen as an examination of toxic masculinity, the male gaze, and the obsession with the "All American Girl/Perfect Woman" and how all that can create so much conflict and terror.
The novel follows a cast of characters from the night of the crime and it’s aftermath. The non-linear and first-person narrative Harsch uses creates this remarkable dizzying effect that plunges the reader into the minds of these small-town residents. We explore this town and the crime through their eyes. The vignette style is used beautifully here, and the little dashes of stream of consciousness only add to the reading experience. If Harsch wasn't such a talented and imaginative writer, a book like this would be boring, trite and downright terrible. It's explosive and transgressive in style and subject.
It's safe to say I like Harsch's version of Americana. In this book, he gives voice (oh boy) to the fringe members of society, for better or worse. For me, Voices After Evelyn can also be seen as an examination of toxic masculinity, the male gaze, and the obsession with the "All American Girl/Perfect Woman" and how all that can create so much conflict and terror.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews