Title: Cruel surprises
Product review: Lehrer presents two parallel stories, a contemporary American Civil War description of battle events and a modern archaeologist's attempt to decipher those events. (This is a technique also used to much more spine-tingling effect by Beverly Connors in her archaeological mystery stories.) Unfortunately the archy character is an excitable scatterbrain and mere day-dreamer, whose pursuit of the past leads to a cruel modern tragedy. There are passages of incantory violence found in an "original" soldier's confessional narrative.Lehrer knows how to plot and has a good premise here, but his prose is jarringly rough, wheezy, and simplistic (e.g., he concludes far too many descriptions with the incredibly lazy phrase "and whatever"). Of the old McNeil-Lehrer PBS News duo, McNeil is the better writer of fiction. This could have made a chilling short story but it went long and whatever.
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