The Book of Luke by Lovell Holder
Not only has Lovell Holder crafted the most delightful redemption stories, he also managed to intrigue me with the inner workings of reality competition shows. Luke is an emotionally (and physically, sort of) broken soul on the verge of losing everything after learning his politician husband, Barnes, is the cheater of the century. That’s when fate comes calling him back to “Endeavor”, the competition series that was the catalyst of their relationship. So many secrets come out, and so many lives are changed. Read this book!
The Book of Luke by Lovell Holder, (List Price: $30, Grand Central Publishing, 9781538770153, December 2025)
Reviewed by Thomas Wallace, Reading Rock Books in Dickson, Tennessee
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I’ve always been a writer who puts character first, and when I embarked on writing this novel, I was prepared for some deep character dives. But Buckeye is larger in scope and size than anything I’d ever attempted, and I had no idea of the depths that awaited me… What I learned–what I keep learning, as a writer–is that when you bring a lot of characters together, a story emerges, and it’s not always the story you thought you were going to write.
When it comes to emotionality in the book, I wanted to portray how — this goes along with the ambiguity — multiple contradictory feelings can exist simultaneously within one person, and how our feelings may change over the day, over an hour, and over a year and a lifetime. Even the simplest things can be the hardest to say. For example, Bo really wants to tell Hans how proud he is. He tries to say it throughout the whole book. It was super frustrating to write. “Come on, Bo! You can do it!” It’s a simple and good emotion, right? You think that it should be easy, but a lifetime of normative training combined with the recurring conflicting aspects of the relationship get in the way. And in this sense, I was very inspired by my own father and grandfather. My grandfather told me how proud he was of my father and how well he’d done in life and so on, but he couldn’t tell my father that. But of course I did, and it made my dad happy. But there’s something that makes certain feelings really hard to express.
There are many examples of this kind of thing throughout history. I was actually inspired by a specific historical event; I came across the true story of a village in Oxfordshire in the 1700s in which a great rumor was said to be spreading that five sisters had been “seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs.” I was obviously fascinated to imagine how the girls’ community would have responded to their case, and how this rumor spreading might easily have become dangerous and even violent…I agree [that the] incredibly sinister aspect of Shirley Jackson’s work, the vilification of the mundane…is definitely terrain that The Hounding shares with Jackson’s stories. Like her, I’m very interested in thinking about the everyday awfulness of people, but I also wanted to try to understand even my most detestable characters. I really wanted to find a degree of sympathy for all of them in order to inhabit their thoughts and feelings.
The premise, of a family in Japan, draws on my experience directly, because I spent time in Japan with my family when I was a child. But what prompted the novel are less specific memories themselves than the hazy, fragmentary quality of my memories from that time, the extent to which they’re partial and distorted. My memories from that time feel like dreams, and their atmosphere is sometimes quite ominous. Eventually a storyline that departs pretty dramatically from any event of my life came along to suit that weird, ominous tone.
