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WORK TITLE: Where the Sun Shines Out
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.kevincatalano.com/
CITY:
STATE: NJ
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Married with two children.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Chittenango, NY; married; children: two.
EDUCATION:University of North Carolina–Greensboro, B.A.; Rutgers University—Newark, M.A., M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, writing instructor; Alternating Current, assistant staff interviewer, 2015–.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Apparitional Experiences, Fiddleblack (Peninsula, OH), 2012; Surreal South ’13, edited by Joss Woods, Press 53 (Winston-Salem, NC), 2013; and Exigencies, edited by Richard Thomas, Dark House Press (Chicago, IL), 2015. Contributor to periodicals, including Aethlon: A Journal of Sport Literature, Atticus Review, Booth, FRiGG, Gargoyle Magazine, PANK, Pear Noir!, storySouth, and Used Furniture Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Author Kevin Catalano was born in the town of Chittenango, New York—a town otherwise famous because it was the birthplace of L. Frank Baum, the author of the children’s classic The Wizard of Oz. “This basically means,” said the contributor of a biographical blurb to the author’s home page, the Kevin Catalano Website, “that when he was a child, he met many of the surviving Munchkin actors.” Catalano’s long-fiction debut, Where the Sun Shines Out, is set in Chittenango and features the town’s relationship to Baum as part of the backdrop for the work’s plot. “There are Oz Munchkins,” the author told Kate Brandes on the ’17 Scribes website, “and drugs and kidnapping and death and basketball and snow and bare-knuckle fighting and weaponized eggs and scars and the Erie Canal and history and some sex (there could have been more) and a dog.”
Catalano has said that the relatively bleak story grew out of the idea of hope and despair, and the relationship between the two. “Obama’s first inaugural,” which emphasized hope, he told Brandes, “inspired me to write the first story about a mayor of a small village (where I grew up) who had big aspirations … but winds up being disappointed.” The focus of Catalano’s novel, however, is on ten-year-old Dean Fleming, who is kidnapped from Chittenango’s Oz festival along with his younger brother Jason. Dean survives the ordeal but Jason does not. “Wracked with guilt over his failure to save his brother,” explained a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “he pushes his parents away.” Dean’s family falls apart under the weight of guilt and grief.” “Post tragedy,” wrote Thomas Gaughan in Booklist, “Chittenango’s decline is largely a Rust Belt story of job loss and opioid addiction.”
Dean’s story continues for more than two decades and takes him into some very dark places. “Sometimes it risks being too dark, but the strength of the novel is finding ways to shine where the sun won’t, where the only available light to be found is through an appreciation of darkness and an idea that beauty can fill in for hope,” stated Al Kratz on the Coil website. “Consistent with all of these stories is the trustworthy guiding hands of Catalano delivering an entertaining story about a specific world the reader has likely never seen.” “The writing carries the story through the years,” declared Jon Arlan in Foreword Reviews, “without letting go of the hope that these lives can somehow right themselves.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2017, Thomas Gaughan, review of Where the Sun Shines Out, p. 22.
Publishers Weekly, August 28, 2017, review of Where the Sun Shines Out, p. 106.
ONLINE
’17 Scribes, http://17scribes.com/ (September 29, 2017), Kate Brandes, “Interview with Kevin Catalano, Author of Where the Sun Shines Out.“
Coil, https://medium.com/ (December 20, 2017), Al Kratz, review of Where the Sun Shines Out.
Foreword Reviews, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (March 21, 2018), Jon Arlan, review of Where the Sun Shines Out.
Kevin Catalano Website, http://www.kevincatalano.com (March 21, 2018), author profile.
Kevin Catalano was born in Chittenango, NY, a village outside Syracuse that celebrates the birthplace of Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum. This basically means that when he was a child, he met many of the surviving Munchkin actors -- tiny, kind raisin humans who’ve since warped his fantasies.
His debut novel, Where the Sun Shines Out, was published by Skyhorse Publishing in October of 2017. His first book is The Word Made Flesh (Queen's Ferry Press), a collection of dark flash and short stories. Other work has appeared in places like PANK, storySouth, Booth, Pear Noir!, Atticus Review, Gargoyle Magazine, FRiGG, Used Furniture Review, Aethlon: a Journal of Sport Literature. His stories have also been anthologized in Press 53’s Surreal South ’13, Fiddleblack Annuals #1 and #2, and in Dark House Press’s Exigencies. In 2015, Kevin became assistant staff interviewer at Alternating Current.
He earned his B.A. in English from UNC-Greensboro, and his M.A. and MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Newark. He teaches writing at Rutgers, and lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children.
Kevin is represented by Kirsten Carleton of Prospect Agency.
Where the Sun Shines Out
Thomas Gaughan
Booklist.
114.4 (Oct. 15, 2017): p22.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Where the Sun Shines Out. By Kevin Catalano. Oct. 2017. 304p. Skyhorse, $24.99 (9781510721999).
Chittenango, New York, is a small town with a singular distinction. It's the birthplace of L. Frank Baum,
and each year the town stages the Oz Fest. But at the 1991 Fest, Dean Fleming, 10, and his younger brother
Jason, 8, are abducted. Jason is murdered, but Dean escapes by swimming across a lake, towing Jason's
body. Catalano's first novel takes on an ambitious challenge: exploring the effect of the tragedy on Dean, his
family, and the entire town, employing numerous characters, and scuffling along over two-plus decades.
Foremost is Dean, who knew, as he dragged Jason's body across the lake, that he should have been the
victim. Nine years later, Dean is a local "menace," repeating the twelfth grade before moving on to Oxy,
speed, and heroin. Post tragedy, Chittenango's decline is largely a Rust Belt story of job loss and opioid
addiction. But the mayor's efforts to resurrect the Oz Fest, featuring the last surviving "Munchkin," is both
cringe-worthy and funny. The story is largely a bleak one, but there are flashes of Richard Russo in
Catalano's feeling for the rough edges of upstate New York.--Thomas Gaughan
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Gaughan, Thomas. "Where the Sun Shines Out." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2017, p. 22. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776096/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=73a89521.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512776096
3/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1520194941153 2/2
Where the Sun Shines Out
Publishers Weekly.
264.35 (Aug. 28, 2017): p106.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Where the Sun Shines Out
Kevin Catalano. Skyhorse, $24.99 (304p) ISBN 978-1-5107-2199-9
One summer day in 1992, 10-year-old Dean Fleming, the protagonist of Catalano's gripping first novel, is
waiting in line with his brother, Jason, and their father for autographs of the Munchkins at the annual
Chittenago, N.Y., festival celebrating L. Frank Baum, local hero and author of the Oz books. When their
father briefly leaves them, Wayne and Carol Flowers abduct the boys and take them to a secluded cottage
on Lake Oneida. Jason dies at the hands of their captors, but Dean manages to escape by swimming across
the lake. When the police try to question Dean to gain his assistance in finding Wayne and Carol, he
remains mute. Wracked with guilt over his failure to save his brother, he pushes his parents away. Even the
people of Chittenago find themselves changed as their lives intertwine with Dean's in the years that follow.
This tale of loss, punishment, and the struggle for forgiveness grabs the reader by the throat and never lets
go. Agent: Kirsten Carleton, Prospect Agency. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Where the Sun Shines Out." Publishers Weekly, 28 Aug. 2017, p. 106. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502652607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=55b1f663.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502652607
A raw, unflinching literary debut for fans of Dennis Lehane and Tom Franklin examining the aftershocks of survival, and the price of salvation.
In the blue-collar town of Chittenango, New York, two young boys are abducted from a local festival and taken to a cabin in the woods. One is kept; one is killed. When they are next seen, ten-year-old Dean has escaped by swimming across Oneida Lake holding his brother' s dead body.
As the years pass, the people of Chittenango struggle to cope with the collateral damage of this unspeakable act of violence, reverberations that disrupt the community and echo far beyond. With nothing holding it together, Dean's family disintegrates under the twin weights of guilt and grief, and the unspoken acknowledgment that the wrong child survived. At the center of it all, Dean himself must find a place in a future that never should have been his.
In a sweeping narrative spanning decades and told from alternating points of view, Where the Sun Shines Out tells the story of a town and the inevitable trauma we inflict upon each other when we're trying our best. Exploring the bonds, and breakdowns, of families, Kevin Catalano's fearless debut reminds us that although the path to redemption is pockmarked, twisted, and often hidden from view, somehow the sun makes it through.
TitleWhere the Sun Shines Out
SubtitleA Novel
AuthorBy Kevin Catalano
PublisherSkyhorse Publishing
ImprintSkyhorse Publishing
Published17 October 2017
FormatHardback
ISBN-139781510721999
Pages304
Dimensions6.00 x 9.00in.
About the author
Kevin Catalano was born in Chittenango, NY, and met all of the surviving Munchkin actors as a child. His stories have appeared in [PANK], Gargoyle Magazine, Used Furniture Review, storySouth, Surreal South '13, Exigencies Anthology, and others. He received an MFA from Rutgers-Newark, and he lives in New Jersey with his wife and two children.
Praise for Where the Sun Shines Out
"This tale of loss, punishment, and the struggle for forgiveness grabs the reader by the throat and never lets go."— Publishers Weekly
"I f*cking loved this book . . . Natural, conversational prose and characters that very well might live across the street from all of us populate this story of how a simple decision can define all the lives around us . . . I'll dare to bet this novel will be talked about for many, many years to come." — Brian Panowich, award-winning author of Bull Mountain
"There is an unnerving knot of adrenaline that sizzles in your gut after reading the first page, taking you on psychological roller coaster ride into the unnerving darkness of the human soul, where redemption, regret, addiction, suffering, and loss haunt the characters of Chittenango, New York. Be warned, this is dark territory to trespass through and by the last page your brain will be rattled by the tense prose and bad ass storytelling penned by Kevin Catalano." —Frank Bill, author of Crimes in Southern Indiana, Donnybrook, and The Savage
"Ambitious and gripping, Where the Sun Shines Out examines not only how an act of violence can tear apart the heart of a town and a family, but how that heart can be repaired, stitch by stitch. Kevin Catalano is a writer with real promise." —Lou Berney, Edgar Award-winning author of The Long and Faraway Gone
"Where the Sun Shines Out is one of those rare stories that makes the world around you disappear—pulling you into a tense and dysfunctional narrative that ultimately leaves you shaking and spent. Kevin Catalano is an author to watch, a powerful voice that needs to be read." — Richard Thomas, author of Disintegration and editor of Exigencies
"I read this novel in one sitting. How does a person redeem a real life nightmare? Kevin Catalano portrays the full ramifications with an astute eye and great wisdom. He can't write his next book fast enough for me." —Alice Elliott Dark, author of In the Gloaming and Think of England
"Through a series of emotional aftershocks, Kevin Catalano's Where the Sun Shines Out centers on identity, sexuality, and the abiding nature of family and home place; this arresting novel striking in an instant yet unspooling its trauma throughout interconnected stories gripped by prescience. Unsettling and deeply felt, a book that reminds us fate won't be outrun." — Erin McKnight, founding editor and publisher of Queen's Ferry Press and firthFORTH Books
"Where the Sun Shines Out is a beautifully written psychological thriller that explores with depth and compassion the psychological price of survival. Kevin Catalano has written a compelling novel full of memorable characters whose many perspectives demonstrate the far reaches of a single criminal act." — Lee Zacharias, author of The Only Sounds We Make
"An arresting debut—it's smart, horrifying, yet brimming with heart. You will not be able to put it down."—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
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Posted: September 29, 2017 by katebrandes
Interview with Kevin Catalano, Author of Where the Sun Shines Out
Today we’re happy to be talking with Kevin Catalano about his debut literary crime novel, Where the Sun Shines Out.
Please describe what your story is about.
There are Oz Munchkins and drugs and kidnapping and death and basketball and snow and bare-knuckle fighting and weaponized eggs and scars and the Erie Canal and history and some sex (there could have been more) and a dog.
Share a teaser sentence or two from your novel.
“The voice saying she wanted him, not his brother, ordering him to change his clothes, telling him to eat, and when he wouldn’t, saying she knew what he wanted, and there was her breast, and on his tongue now he tasted it, the taste of betrayal.”
What do you want people to know about your book?
This was rejected by countless editors who thought it too dark to publish, but I find the novel implicitly optimistic.
What did you learn about yourself while writing this novel?
That my plot inclinations are almost always toward violence, and so there must be something inside I’m trying to work out or exorcise. I’m paying someone to try to explain to me what that is.
What was your timeline from drafting to publication?
The exact age of my daughter: seven.
What is your favorite part of writing (drafting characters, making up scenes, plotting, developing emotional turning points, etc). Why?
I love the drafting stage — when anything is possible, when the book can be any damn thing I want, and the editing stage — when I can open the manuscript at any time of day or night and play with a sentence.
Briefly, where did the idea for your book come from?
Obama’s first inaugural inspired me to write the first story about a mayor of a small village (where I grew up) who had big aspirations for hope and change… but winds up being disappointed.
When do you do your best thinking about your work in progress?
My best thinking happens at night, in bed, when I visualize the scene I’m working on as if it were a film. I often have ideas to include in the draft the following day… if I can remember them!
Share something people may be surprised to know about you?
That despite what’s in the book, I have a perfectly functioning family, and I had a great childhood, and that the hometown that’s depicted in the novel is hardly as sinister as the one in real life.
What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
There are no tricks to landing an agent/getting a book published; all you have to do is write something great.
What’s next?
Ugh! This thing that I’ve been working on for five years. After rewriting it from scratch three times, I think I’ve finally found the form, the style, and the voice. (The characters and the story were always there, but how to tell it?)
We asked Kevin to pose his own interview question. Here’s what he said, followed by his answer:
My mother and aunt often ask: Why don’t you write anything happy or funny? I tried, once. Right after my daughter was born — a traumatic, miracle birth where the generosity of people and the universe were revealed to me — I sat down to write something uplifting. That was the first time I ever had writer’s block. When I finally gave up trying, the very first thing I wrote was the darkest and bleakest story I’ve ever written.
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WHERE THE SUN SHINES OUT
In the blue-collar town of Chittenango in upstate New York, birthplace of L. Frank Baum, two boys are abducted from the annual Oz Fest. When they are next seen, 10-year-old Dean has escaped by swimming across Oneida Lake with his brother’s dead body.
The novel follows the wake of this unspeakable act of violence as Dean, his family, and the town struggle to cope with the compounding damage, from sexual abuse to drug addiction to abandonment, all the while hoping for redemption. WHERE THE SUN SHINES OUT is a novel about families, trauma, and the terrible things people do to each other when they’re doing their best.
WHERE THE SUN SHINES OUT will be available in Octiber 2017 through Arcade Publishers
Homepage
The Coil
Al Kratz
Writer living in Indianola, Iowa. Runner up in the Spring 2016 Bath Flash Fiction award. Publications listed at alkratz.blogspot.com.
Dec 20, 2017
On Kevin Catalano’s ‘Where the Sun Shines Out’
Catalano’s dark novel shines where the sun won’t, gives hope in small doses, and treats trauma and family with grace.
Kevin Catalano
Fiction | Novel
304 pages
6.5” x 9” Hardcover
ISBN 978–1510721999
First Edition
Skyhorse Publishing
New York, New York, USA
Available HERE
$16.50
Kevin Catalano’s debut novel, Where the Sun Shines Out, opens with a character waking to the disarming sensation of a human ear smashed against his cheek. Here Dean realizes, at the same time the reader does, that he has entered a new world, stuffed in a trunk with his brother, Jason. The intense start promises how the world will work: full speed ahead regardless of darkness. The pace also quickly alerts the reader that this is no conventional kidnapping story. While the crime and its immediate results are riveting, they also are mostly foundation. There isn’t prolonged mystery or even short-term dwelling in these events. The third chapter jumps forward nine years. The total story is told via connected stories in a web of legacy surrounding the characters of Chittenango, New York, starting with Dean’s parents, turning to a boy named Brett, whom Dean alternately influences, bullies, and explores homosexuality with. From Brett, there are additional relationships developed in these Chittenango stories loaded with family dysfunction, economic hardship, and drug addiction.
It is apparent early that post-traumatic life is going to be difficult for Dean and for everyone he touches.
“Dean-O?” Karl tries, but his son’s eyeballs don’t want to see. They move in frightening, mechanical jerks, as though he were a robot malfunctioning.
“We need help,” Rene spits at Karl, shrinking to the floor, “God help us, we need help.
(p. 29)
Sometimes it risks being too dark, but the strength of the novel is finding ways to shine where the sun won’t, where the only available light to be found is through an appreciation of darkness and an idea that beauty can fill in for hope. Grace is given in small, but potent doses. Here Dean finds it in the consolation of a half-sister too young to fully know the dark side of her family legacy.
When he first saw Sara, who skipped to him in a Dorothy dress, brown hair in braids, he sat on the floor and wept, right there in the family room. The child put her arms around him, her love immediate and unconditional. She said, “S’okay. S’okay.” They knew each other. She understood the roots of his pain. Her touch was the only one that healed.
(p. 237)
Consistent with all of these stories is the trustworthy guiding hands of Catalano delivering an entertaining story about a specific world the reader has likely never seen. They are all told from a fairly distant third-person view that allows Catalano to highlight the darkness with a compassionate realism, but there were times I wanted the book to zoom deeper into the interior. To handle the emotions his characters could not. Some events are too intense, times too intense, and relationships too intense, but the grace of handling pain and putting words to the emotions, giving the characters control is often held back. Here Dean’s father faces this dilemma:
This sounded so stupid; it was why Karl never talked in this way. Trying to explain feelings was impossible, pointless. They weren’t meant to be explained, just felt, and anyway, he didn’t have the vocabulary for it. When he tried, it sounded too obvious.
(p. 51).
Reading this book led me to think about several other missing-person books I have read over the last couple of years and how they all share a common trait of intensity. Where they differ is their focus. Descent, by Tim Johnston, uses suspense, unraveling the mystery. Lamb, by Bonnie Nadzam, works from the kidnapper’s eye, an uncomfortable closeness to his perspective. Nobody Is Ever Missing, by Catherine Lacey, addresses the push and pull of individual escape. The Missing Girl, by Jacqueline Doyle, takes the compression of flash fiction to intensify the missing’s story via what can be told and what can only be implied. Catalano’s specialty is the aftermath. Exploring what happens next. How far the stain can spread. How it is unable to blot out the beauty completely.
The birds took off into noisy flight. Collectively, they skimmed the water going northward, then darted up above the budding trees. As they ascended high into the atmosphere, their shape accordioned — thinning out, then bunching — as if they were showing Brett how to breathe.
(p. 81)
Starred Review:
Where the Sun Shines Out
Kevin Catalano
Skyhorse Publishing (Oct 3, 2017)
Hardcover $24.99 (304pp)
978-1-5107-2199-9
This novel is as compelling as it is bitter, tragic, and heartrending.
In the first gripping, gut-wrenching scenes of Kevin Catalano’s darkly beautiful Where the Sun Shines Out, a kidnapping unfolds with clockwork efficiency and terrible, far-reaching repercussions.
It is the summer of 1992. Ten-year-old Dean Fleming and his younger brother, Jason, attend an annual celebration of The Wizard of Oz. Left alone for a moment, they are abducted. Dean manages to escape alive; his brother does not.
Over twenty-five years and with a half-dozen major and minor characters, Catalano weaves together a raw, complex portrait of a steel town reeling not only from the murder-kidnapping, but from a steady social and economic collapse. Poverty, creeping like rust, is all around in this deeply felt literary thriller.
Ten years later, Dean is an angry, lonely, frustrated man bent on inflicting pain on his only friend. Brutality and tenderness are knotted tightly together in this story: fathers hurt sons, friends hurt friends, husbands hurt wives, everyone disappoints everyone.
Addiction—especially opiate addiction—is also central to their lives. Catalano’s depiction of drug abuse and addiction is compassionate and honest, lyrical yet utterly unsentimental. “One drug brought the sun,” he writes when Dean mixes speed with heroin, “and the other made it sizzle.”
The prospects are terribly bleak for these characters—even Henderson Lovely, the last surviving munchkin from the Oz film, makes an appearance as a sad, broken old man. Some will no doubt find Catalano’s gloomy characters and plot points too heavy, but the writing carries the story through the years without letting go of the hope that these lives can somehow right themselves.
“The majority of his existence had been like a rusty plow scouring the earth wherever he went, ruining those he came in contact with,” the narrator says of the main character. Still, he’s striving for redemption—like everyone else—and his path is as compelling as it is bitter, tragic, and heartrending.
Reviewed by Jon Arlan
Debut Fiction 2017