Foreword to "At the Edge of America," two-novel set by Allen Frost

The following essay serves as the Foreword to a 2016 pair of novels by Allen Frost, published by Good Deed Rain Books. The book link follows the essay.

“balloonless with the buffaloes,” “what people missed, they dreamed,” “the savior and his eden” – the chapter titles read as miniature poems. They evoke miniature worlds. Welcome to the vast and constantly shifting imaginary of Allen Frost. I had heard about Allen Frost before I met him, way back in 1986. My friend Neal told me that this friend of his had written a novel while in high school, called Blue Anthem Wailing… Blue Anthem Wailing, that title haunted me: its rhythm, which seems to build until the penultimate syllable, WAI-ling; its intrigue, which is generated by the synesthesia of the phrase - the anthem has a color;  the energy of the phrase, three words that each spark individually, but that generate a flame when strung together. I then began to hear about the content of the book. One of the characters was a man named “Danny” who ran the hot dog stand in the center of a small town and seemed to be a big gaseous, benevolent guy but actually wore a KKK robe beneath his hot dog vendor garb.

An America that hides its mendacity behind the face of a gladhanding fool; language and word clusters that intoxicate and even threaten to distract the reader from the narrative, but that are actually crucial incantations that cannot be separated from the multi-layered and constantly morphing worlds of the story --  as a teenager, Allen Frost was already forging key elements of his voice and vision. This voice and vision  are in full flower in the two novels contained in At the Edge of America. A hot air balloon travels across North American geography and North American history; a man inhabits the consciousness of a dodo as this creature witnesses invasion and pillage; and we learn what could possibly be meant by the phrase, “Houdini’s Arsonist Childhood.” Allen Frost territory is one where the dark riddles of the “old, weird America,” described by Greil Marcus in his book about Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes, are allowed to roam free and where characters must find love in these haunted landscapes if they are to survive.

: https://www.amazon.com/At-Edge-America-Allen-Frost/dp/1945176601/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1466003141&sr=1-1&keywords=at+the+edge+of+america+allen+frost