Lights Out in the Reptile House

A shy and apolitical herpetologist-in-training finds the weight of history bearing down on him as the effects of repression ramp up in his country In an unspecified country that combines elements of Chile under its military regime, South Africa under apartheid, and Italy under fascism, fifteen-year-old Karel Roeder asks only to be left alone to learn from Albert, his mentor at the zoo's reptile house, and to devote himself to his girlfriend, Leda. But both Leda and Albert lead him into increasingly proscribed areas of thought and speech, and thus into conflict with a newly ascendant party that intends to prosecute a border war against an officially despised ethnic group and criminalize dissent. Citizens have been disappearing and surveillance in the name of safety has become all-pervasive. When Kehr, a special assistant of the civil guard, billets himself at Karel's house for unknown reasons, Karel finds his already tenuous hold on his own innocence crushed as Kehr--tribune, inquisitor, and metaphysician of terror--instructs his unwilling protégé in those moments when history is let off the leash. Lights Out in the Reptile House is at once a dystopian political parable, a meditation on totalitarianism, and a moving coming-of-age story, as its protagonist struggles to understand his own values and meaning even in the most extreme of crucibles.

About the Author :
Jim Shepard (b. 1956) is the author of four short story collections and seven novels, most recently The Book of Aron, which has been shortlisted for both the Kirkus Prize and the American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal. Originally from Connecticut, Shepard now lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He is the J. Leland Miller Professor of English at Williams College, where he teaches creative writing and film. He won the Story Prize for his collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Shepard's stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, among other publications; five have been selected for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize.

Review :
"An astonishing imaginative achievement." --J. M. Coetzee "A writer who must be read . . . Written with such graceful lucidity and such relentless storytelling power that it becomes a political fable for the ages." --Newsday "Written with a chilling elegance . . . Very frightening indeed." --The Washington Post Book World "A magnificently courageous and compassionate book, it brings us, as the great writers always have, into a universe of moral choice. You can't finish this novel unshaken by it." --Charles Baxter "Gruesome scenes of physical torture add credibility to this nightmarish, politically charged novel in the tradition of George Orwell's 1984." --Publishers Weekly "A fresh, horrifying look at man's inhumanity to man." --Library Journal