Review by Daniel Temianka: Apricot Brandy — A Winner
Apricot Brandy — A Winner, February 28, 2008
by Daniel Temianka
Lynn Cesar begins by lulling her readers with sweet bleakness: a roving young woman, orphaned by suicide and maternal tragedy, returns to her rural home in search of closure. Then she makes the mistake of guzzling her abusive dad’s magical homemade booze (the book’s title), and compounds the blunder by checking her basement for pods (the old fashioned kind, not i). Soon she’s flailing in a Mayan hell, where plants and homicidal corpses riot.
Imagine corrupt cops conspiring with onyx-eyed Mayan gods and dead fathers… and a witch. Stay far away from the sheriffs, the medical examiner and the ex-cons.
Lynn Cesar is a top-drawer spell-caster of rural and Central American horror and hypnoguery. You’ll never again pass complacently by a greenhouse or nursery — to say nothing of measuring radon under your floorboards — once you’ve read A.B. I couldn’t put it down!
By Dan Temianka, author of “The Jack Vance Lexicon”