Who's Huck's Daddy? Find Out Tomorrow!

Jon Clinch will read from Finn tomorrow, Tuesday, April 17, 2007, in the Howard Thurman Room, Marsh Chapel, Boston University, at 5:30 pm.

In his first book, Jon Clinch transforms Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by tackling where Huck came from. In this take on the classic, Huck has a black mother, and his father is a human-flesh-roasting, floor-licking nutter.

About the flesh-roasting, we're not kidding. Here's a paragraph from an excerpt available online:

"Finn unties the tow sack and lays out its contents, long strips dark and dimly glistening, pieces of flayed flesh identically sliced save one. Their regularity in width and length and thickness speaks of a huntsman’s easy skill and a plotter’s furtive patience and something else too. He chooses one and throws it upon the fire, where it sizzles and smokes and curls in upon itself as sinuously as a lie."

Twain always loved hyperbole, so Clinch's book may impress even him. In its review, the Weekly Dig tried to look at Finn without thinking of Mark Twain. That's a big challenge, but reviewer Zak M. Salih came to the conclusion that "As a hypothetical character study and an exercise in the depths of human depravity … Finn charts some extraordinarily tough - and vividly rendered - territory." Even without the Twain gimmick, Jon Clinch's reading should be gripping.

Image of the Finn book cover from Amazon.