- Amazon.com editorial reviewA brutal and rewarding first novel… Chapman’s landscape often resembles the gothic terrain of Flannery O’Connor or the early works of Cormac McCarthy.
Miss Corpus
This hugely imaginative first novel that traces the road trips of two complete strangers on a dramatic collision course with fate.
Will has just returned home from sea to find his wife lying dead on the kitchen floor. Four states away, Phil has been waiting for his son to return home, only to discover his body decomposing at the bottom of a nearby swamp. Will’s wife always wanted a highway-bound honeymoon. Phil’s son always wanted to see the country. In an attempt to pick up the pieces of their lives, both Will and Phil load up their cars and hit the road. An imaginative first novel tracing the fateful collision of two complete strangers, miss corpus floors the accelerator from the first page and never brakes. At once poignant, horrifying, clever and unnerving, miss corpus is a feat of literary acrobatics from an astoundingly gifted new voice in fiction.
Trade Paperback
- ISBN
- 9780786886357
- Publication date
- February, 1st, 2003
Hardcover
- ISBN
- 9780786867387
- Publication date
- February, 1st, 2003
Praises for Miss Corpus
- Publishers Weekly…Dizzyingly imaginative first novel. Suffused with a compassion, the novel transcends its bizarre premise and suggests that the magic of literature can make sense of life.
- Orlando SentinelReaders drawn to Flannery O’Connor and the young Cormac McCarthy’s pitch-perfect Southern grotesques will find Miss Corpus a page-turner that’s often oddly moving.
- Stewart O'Nan, author of Wish You Were HereClay Chapman has a boatload of talent – he can riff in alliteration and make metaphors up there with William H. Gass – and the audacity to whip this lyrical, superpsycho road novel on us. Miss Corpus is a twisted, lovely, gushing, word-drunk debut.