In the sweet, slow-paced first scene of Darren Callahan’s The Numbing of Audrey Green, it’s 1957 and a bright eight-year-old girl eavesdrops on her father as he repeats a strange, irresistible chord on the piano. Seemingly tailor-made to snare grown-ups raised on A Wrinkle in Time and “The Chronicles of Narnia,” this quasimystical hook quickly drags the reader into a violent, sexy saga of embezzlement, murder, and abandonment–not to mention watery supernatural subway stations through which people who may or may not be dead wander and swap identities.
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Numbing is the first volume in a self-published trilogy, “The Chronicles of Audrey Green,” that Callahan, a local writer and musician, has been selling on the Web for the last few years. On his site (www.darrencallahan.com) you can buy the individual books for $10 a pop or get the entire 761-page soft-bound set for $20. You can also buy CDs and cassettes by the slew of bands he’s played in, plus unproduced screenplays and several other self-published novels, including his first, Hours Until We Sleep, of which Callahan says, “Like most first novels, I like it but I hate it.”
His prose admittedly moves to odd rhythms. The stories are built around the unsettling repetition of various patterns: people share eerie variants of the same name; musical scores turn out to be guides to stealing from company coffers. The haunting chord that grabs Audrey in Numbing is only the first strand in a web of bizarre non-coincidences. But the narrative’s twists always serve the tale, and Callahan conjures interlocking spirals of plot and meaning from masterfully orchestrated crowds of dance-hall girls, beboppers, society ladies, murderous highwaymen, plague-ridden children, and a young woman on a quest to find her missing stepsister. Callahan says some readers find the first book confusing, but by the third installment “it’s like crack. People have just become addicted to it–its complexities and its characters. That makes me happy.”
