Written by Gilbert Reid
Twin Rivers Productions, 2019
About the Book
In a Sicilian seaside town, on the eve of a film festival, an alcoholic journalist spirals towards annihilation. In the golden twilight of the dolce vita, while terrorists kill, a group of women in Rome happily trade lovers like toys. In the bucolic heart of rustic England, a perfect summer’s day ends when a handsome terrorist boards a train. In Toronto, when he is beaten to a pulp, a hulking but childlike inmate in an asylum catches a glimpse of the toxic man he once was, and of the explosive accident that turned him into the creature he now is. In California, a brilliant cynical Hollywood producer grudgingly faces the ruins of love. After a flood, a little girl confronts the reality of death.
Gilbert Reid’s “raw, elegant prose, his vivid and sensuous images leave one breathless, with recognition and terror.”
— Diana Leblanc, actor, director
Reviews and Criticism of Lava and Other Stories
“Very powerful, poetic and nasty and tough”
— Anna Porter
“The writing is terrific. The characters are glamorous, decayed, old, young, loved, unloved. Reid inhabits each one. His raw, elegant prose, his vivid and sensuous images leave one breathless, with recognition and terror.”
— Diana Leblanc, actor, director
“After reading Lava I felt dizzy, drunk. The visceral knowledge of people, their staginess, their warped and unwarped self-reflecting, their sexualities, their horny yearnings, and imbalances – all dizzying and destabilizing… And “That was the Summer That.” Whew. Oh! The women, how they speak, what they confide, and omit, what they expose about each other! It’s as if only sexuality happened that summer, with the rest of life uninteresting blessedly consigned to a dependent clause, and.”
— Susan S. Senstad, author of Milk and Venom and Music for the Third Ear
“Lava – captivating from start to finish, this tense, moving story of a man’s existential struggle is set in a timeless Sicily and combines elements of Lowry’s Under the Volcano with the existentialist, not-so-sweet life of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.”
— Chuck Shamata, actor
