BEST OF YEAR: Selected by Miami Herald, Kirkus Reviews, Largehearted Boy, and Oprah.com
“Both moving and intimate. . . . It’s rare to find a book that reads as if it were written out of necessity. This book is one; absorbing and with an undeniable current of truth.” —Oprah.com
“Mann creates a stunning, and chilling, portrait of the brother he hardly knew. This type of investigation could easily slip into exploitation but doesn’t, because contained in the voice of the adult narrator is the yearning of the eight-year-old boy, who wonders, Why was my brother the way he was? Mann the boy demands an answer; Mann the adult understands he may never know. . . . Lord Fear is Mann’s attempt to make his brother’s untimely death mean something significant, and in doing so, to imbue his own life with deeper meaning.” —Alizah Salario, Los Angeles Review of Books
“In Lord Fear, Mann folds Josh’s writings in with contemplative renderings of his interviews, imbuing those conversations with the buzz and herky-jerky flow of a postmodern detective novel. The result is a nonlinear, scrapbook-style investigative memoir as redolent of the bluesy crime pursuits of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe as it is of the narcotized reveries of William Burroughs.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Lord Fear is not a biography or an elegy or a even a memoir so much as it is a meditation on the function of grace, proof that love can defy all logic, transcend facts or even reality itself until it is almost indistinguishable from faith. . . . Mann’s first book, 2013’s Class A, was a genius piece of narrative reportage. . . . With Lord Fear, although its roots are firmly planted in the soil of fact, Mann allows himself something more akin to a fiction project, in the way that he sends out his imagination to inhabit those whose lives were affected by Josh. . . . The best we can do sometimes is to look at things honestly, describe them as accurately as possible and say to each other, ‘Well, this is really kind of sad, isn’t it? In his sensitivity for these sorts of states, Mann proves himself one of the most talented young nonfiction writers working today.” —Nicholas Mancusi, Miami Herald
“I read this book in a sustained state of near-tears. It’s a masterpiece. . . . Lord Fear is the most evocative treatment of this kind of crooked adolescent male logic that I’ve ever read, and the most affecting elicitation of boys’ conflicted thirst for danger. . . . I read it with gratitude.” —John Lingan, Chicago Tribune
“Lucas Mann’s genre-bending first book, Class A . . . heralded an impressive new talent in narrative nonfiction. Mann’s second book, Lord Fear, reaffirms that talent . . . [and] demonstrates that Mann is a writer who avoids reductionism, instead embracing complexity and uncertainty.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR
“Mann’s compact, almost New-Journalistic attempt to understand his older brother, who died of an overdose when Lucas was 13, isn’t the first or even the tenth bereaved-sibling memoir, but its blend of taut novelistic style and documentary rigor makes it one of the strongest. Mann has a knack for tracking down uncomfortable truths (‘did you love him?’ he asks his brother’s best friend) and burrowing in, like a metaphysical gumshoe, where others would turn away. Mann wants us to know his beautiful mess of a brother better than he ever did.” —Boris Kachka, Vulture, New York Magazine (“8 Books You Need to Read This May”)
“Mann grasps at splinters of spasmodic speculation. His prose jabs at and probes the unknown. You can feel his own life and soul are on the line here. This is an awesome, emotionally riveting memoir.” —Providence Journal
“I know when I’ve found a good book when it slows me down, as Lucas Mann’s Lord Fear did. It’s also a good sign, I find, when the book is hard to describe, as Lord Fear is. On the surface, it’s a memoir about Mann’s enigmatic older brother, who died of a heroin overdose when Mann was thirteen. But it’s more about memory, myth-making, and desire than its plot suggests. Written mainly from the perspectives of those who knew his brother at different points in his life, the book’s scenes, reconstructed from interviews, are delicately rendered and hyper-self aware; with this unflinching, fractured examination of his brother, Mann suggests that writing about and investigating any life produces infinite contradictory representations that orbit around an indefinable center. Mann is driving at how we know that unknowable thing—taking us right up to language’s edge, where we watch him peer over.” —Jeffery Gleaves, Paris Review
“When he was just thirteen, Lucas Mann lost his older brother Josh to a heroin overdose. In his moving and strikingly honest memoir, Lord Fear, Mann interrogates this loss and grapples with the frustrating fragility of memory in attempting to understand a man he deeply adored, but hardly got the chance to know. It is this exquisite tension of knowing and not knowing that lends the book its power and makes it worth sinking your teeth into.” —Esquire (“6 Books You Absolutely Can’t Miss This May”)
“Mann spent nearly 10 years ferreting out this picture of his older half brother, Josh, dead of a drug overdose. Mann was much younger than his blustery, angry brother. The actions that seemed incomprehensible and abnormal to the adults in their lives are seen by the younger Mann as sometimes admirable or brave or normal but scary. Thus, amid the terror found in this book are also moments of joy. . . . Lord Fear treads carefully, but the shards on this path are ever painful.” —Booklist
“I know when I’ve found a good book when it slows me down, as Lucas Mann’s Lord Fear did. It’s also a good sign, I find, when the book is hard to describe, as Lord Fear is. On the surface, it’s a memoir about Mann’s enigmatic older brother, who died of a heroin overdose when Mann was thirteen. But it’s more about memory, myth-making, and desire than its plot suggests. Written mainly from the perspectives of those who knew his brother at different points in his life, the book’s scenes, reconstructed from interviews, are delicately rendered and hyper–self aware; with this unflinching, fractured examination of his brother, Mann suggests that writing about and investigating any life produces infinite contradictory representations that orbit around an indefinable center. Mann is driving at how we know that unknowable thing—taking us right up to language’s edge, where we watch him peer over.” —Jeffery Gleaves, The Paris Review (Staff Picks)
“An ambitious, literary-minded memoir of the author’s relationship with his late brother, a much older heroin addict. Mann works on a number of different levels, delivering a narrative of addiction, memory, and family dynamics; of the attempt to see someone through the eyes and different memories of other people; and of the challenges faced by a writer as he attempts to fulfill his literary ambitions. Ultimately, this is a memoir about trying to write a memoir: the challenge, the impossibility, and the catharsis. . . . In constructing his aching, poignant narrative, Mann offers a fine meditation on fate and on how ‘the story of addiction is the story of memory, and how we never get it right.’” —Kirkus (starred review)
“I loved this book—an artifact of the making of memory. The prose is striking and emotional, and the excavation of the dead brother, the meaning of the life cut short, will resonate with many readers. Lord Fear is a psychological and artistic juggernaut.” —Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead
"The book’s called Lord Fear, but its very existence is testament to its author’s fearlessness in confronting the twined, barbed wires of guilt and grief. Lucas Mann wears many hats in this memoir—journalist, stylist, Nabokovian explorer of sense and memory—but in the end it turns out that they’re all the same hat: survivor. Lucas Mann is a rare talent, and Lord Fear is that rare book which matches intellect with emotional candor, and the human condition is presented in all its nudity and terrifying nuance.” —Adam Wilson, author of What’s Important is Feeling
“A searing, complexly rendered memoir that is at times an investigation of the life and death of Mann’s heroin addict brother, at times a frank meditation on brotherhood. This book is made from the one his brother, a writer, never wrote, and is the book only Mann could write. A triumph.” —Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh
“This is a disturbing book, and a powerful one, for its honesty, its emotional precision, and most of all for Mann’s ability to probe, accede to, and resist the mythologizing power of memory.” —Joan Wickersham, author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index
“Lord Fear isn’t just a book about brothers, or addiction, or bereavement—though it is about all of these things, in beautiful and surprising ways; it’s ultimately a book about one man’s fierce and futile desire to fully know his own brother. This is a gorgeous examination of what it means to love someone once he’s gone, what it means to love someone you wish—as Mann puts it so powerfully—could have felt better than he did.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
“Lucas Mann is the most incredible young memoirist in this country. And in Lord Fear, he’s balancing humor, incisive critique and masterful storytelling as only he can. Every now and then, you read books and know that only one person on earth is skilled and loving enough to be that book’s author. Lord Fear is that book and Lucas Mann is that author.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division
“Like the best memoirs, Lord Fear isn’t really about its author’s life: it’s about his brother, Josh, an addict who died young, and the ways we mythologize and grieve a loss like that. This book is generous, unsentimental, often funny, and always smart; Mann has a striking ability to wring meaning from each moment. To sum it up with something I wrote in the margins: Damn, he can write.” —Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun
“Lord Fear is a hard book—as it should be, as its subject (a brother’s fatal overdose) is hard; reconstructing the life and death of another is hard; families are hard; masculinity edging into misogyny is hard; addiction is hard; remembering is hard; grief is hard. Lucas Mann heads straight into these thickets armed with an uncommon emotional intelligence and the capacity to hold great mysteries, fears, horrors, and sorrows in taut, gripping sentences. This is a moving, frightening, expertly written book that stands at the nexus of imagination, encounter, document, and dirge.” —Maggie Nelson, author of The Art of Cruelty
“This book is achingly tender, violent, bittersweet, and bold. Lucas Mann has told the story of his brother in so unpredictable and enthralling a way that he has opened up the story of memory itself wide enough for a new kind of memoir to emerge.” —John D’Agata, author of About a Mountain
05/25/2015
In the hands of New York author and writing teacher Mann (Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere), a chronicle of his older brother's life before it ended in a heroin overdose becomes a suspenseful, if stilted, character study. Mann both adored and feared his older half-brother, Josh, who died at age 28 when the author was 13. Josh was handsome and brilliant, a bodybuilder, a charming ladies' man, and a sadist to those he loved—his mother, his brothers, his girlfriends. By interviewing the people Josh loved and was closest to, author Mann builds the story of his brother's life through narrative reconstruction—a creative nonfiction—for a fluid account that never allows the reader to be moved. The younger brother is hungry to learn about Josh's transgressions as a way to both remember his brother and gain a kind of self-knowledge. On the one hand, his brother provided a model of manhood as a sexual being, a free spirit, and an artist; yet on the other hand, Josh was fragile and spoiled, gripped by inexplicable anxiety ("lord fear"), given to humiliate people, fond of a terrifying pet boa constrictor, and submerged in debilitating drug use in his 20s. Mann's references to the writing of Nabokov, Philip Roth, Roland Barthes, and Virginia Woolf on memory and loss lend the work an elegiac tone, but all the feeling here is cold and hard. (May)
★ 2015-02-11
An ambitious, literary-minded memoir of the author's relationship with his late brother, a much older heroin addict.Mann (Writing/Univ. of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, 2013) works on a number of different levels, delivering a narrative of addiction, memory, and family dynamics; of the attempt to see someone through the eyes and different memories of other people; and of the challenges faced by a writer as he attempts to fulfill his literary ambitions. Ultimately, this is a memoir about trying to write a memoir: the challenge, the impossibility, and the catharsis. It begins at the funeral of Mann's older brother, Josh, since the author, 13 at the time, "once read a Philip Roth novel that begins over a grave." Before he's done, he will invoke Nabokov, Burroughs, Woolf, and Kincaid as literary antecedents whose inspiration has informed his own work. Unlike, say, James Frey, Mann drops his cards on the table from the start, admitting in his author's note that though the focus of the book is a real person, "it is not, however, an exact representation of his life. People's memories contradict one another, and many of the scenes are my imagined versions of the stories they told me, complete with my own subjectivity." In the book, in death, and in the memories of the author and others, Josh is larger than life, a person who "could have been a rock star so easily. Some kind of star," as a friend recalls. He was a would-be musician, a would-be writer, the lover of all sorts of gorgeous, exotic women, a troubled child from before the author's birth, and a junkie who died alone, unexpected and inexplicably, after he'd shown his family and friends he'd cleaned up. In constructing his aching, poignant narrative, Mann offers a fine meditation on fate and on how "the story of addiction is the story of memory, and how we never get it right."
