Not quite literary, not quite genre.

The book is very readable. The genre elements sustain the reader in lizard brain agony: what happens next? Who dunnit? Is there a twist? These aspects held me to the book and I really couldn't put it down. If compulsively readable is what you are looking for you'll find it here. Unfortunately, after I put the book down I wasn't left with very much at all. There were no genre innovations. No shocking reveals. No gateways to a larger epic. There wasn't much of anything in the way of plot. So the book is meant to be propped up by literary mechanisms. There's a poem quoted here. We get some tragic backstory... we get... uh... no interesting questions to ponder about these characters. Actually, I could hardly tell the two main ones apart. Perhaps there is something here about fear and faith in the state of nature but doing the critical work necessary to unearth that would be doing Heller more service than I think he earned.

All in all this was a fun (light) way to spend a few days and I'd recommend this book for anyone on summer break.