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A Novel
by Stefan Merrill Block
The past is not past for Katharine Merrill. Even after two decades of volatile marriage, Katharine still believes she can have the life that she felt promised to her by those first exhilarating days with her husband, Frederick. For two months, just before Frederick left to fight in World War II, Katharine received his total attentiveness, his limitless charms, his astonishing range of intellect and wit. Over the years, however, as Frederick's behavior and moods have darkened, Katharine has covered for him, trying to rein in his great manic passions and bridge his deep wells of sadness: an unending project of keeping up appearances and hoping for the best.
But the project is failing. Increasingly, Frederick's erratic behavior, amplified by alcohol, distresses Katharine and their four daughters and gives his friends and family cause to worry for his sanity. When, in the summer of 1962, a cocktail party ends with her husband in handcuffs, Katharine makes a fateful decision: She commits Frederick to Mayflower Home, America's most revered mental asylum.
There, on the grounds of the opulent hospital populated by great poets, intellectuals, and madmen, Frederick tries to transform his incarceration into a creative exercise, to take each meaningless passing moment and find the art within it. But as he lies on his room's single mattress, Frederick wonders how he ever managed to be all that he once was: a father, a husband, a business executive. Under the faltering guidance of a self-obsessed psychiatrist, Frederick and his fellow patients must try to navigate their way through a gray zone of depression, addiction, and insanity.
Meanwhile, as she struggles to raise four young daughters, Katharine tries to find her way back to Frederick through her own ambiguities, delusions, and the damages done by her rose-colored belief in a life she no longer lives.
Inspired by elements of the lives of the author's grandparents, this haunting love story shifts through time and reaches across generations. Along the way, Stefan Merrill Block stunningly illuminates an age-old truth: even if one's daily life appears ordinary, one can still wage a silent, secret, extraordinary war.
"Starred Review. It's this generation's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, all the more horrifying because of its real-world inspiration." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Taking a true story and building an imagined world of love, mental illness, and the quiet evil of a weak man with power, Block demands a reader’s full attention so as not to miss a single, searing moment." - Library Journal
"Block expertly captures the frustration and personal devastation wreaked by his grandfather's depression… [An] elegantly told story punctuated with photos, letters and a verisimilitude that elevate its fictional ambitions." - Kirkus Reviews
"A moving and rather sad tale. Recommended." - The Book Bag (UK)
"The Storm at the Door is one of the bravest and most beautiful books I have ever read. It's a wholly original hybrid - by turns a fictional account of the love story of Frederick and Katharine Merrill, a terrifying tour of the 'horrorland' of the Mayflower Home for the Mentally Ill, a lucid translation of madness, and a grandson's quest to understand 'the blank page' of his family's past. Stefan Merrill Block's language soars - he's got a wingspan that covers three generations. Refusing to be 'paralyzed by fact,' Block moves nimbly between fact and fiction, history and the imagination, to get at truths that are almost unbearable: that love can fail, that a mind can immolate, and that language can sometimes leave us lonelier than our original silence. This is a powerful, enthralling and unforgettable book." - Karen Russell, New York Times bestselling author of Swamplandia!
"Told with intelligence, a poetic ear for language, and empathy, The Storm at the Door is a captivating story about separation and enduring love." - Lisa Genova, New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice
"The Storm at the Door is a brilliant and passionate examination of the outer limits of language, sanity, and the human heart... Stefan Merrill Block is an amazing writer, at once cerebral and tender, lyrical and profound. The Storm at the Door is an enthrallingly original book." - Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award
This information about The Storm at the Door was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stefan Merrill Block is the author of The Story of Forgetting. He was born in 1982 and grew up in Plano, Texas. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2004. This is his second novel. He lives in Brooklyn. You can visit his website at http://stefanmerrillblock.com/.
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