When you hear voices, is someone there?

Flame Vine: His Voices, by Charles Porter. Privately published. 338 pages. Trade paperback $16.95.

This, the second volume in Mr. Porter’s The Hearing Voices Series, is not like anything else I’ve come across in my many decades of avid book reading. Really! The author provides a truly original voice, a distinctive cast of characters, and an East-Central to Southern Florida landscape that sweeps upward from norther Palm Beach County, touching Wellington, Stuart, Belle Glade, and perhaps Mr. Porter’s home town of Loxahatchee. The narrative has the smell of the burning sugar cane fields up that way, and its characters engage with a lot of other substances that are turned to smoke or imbibed in some other way.

The novel portrays the cultural scene of this swath of Florida as being in many ways representative of the U.S.  during the second half of the 20^th century. It opens in 1950 and takes us into the life of Aubrey Shallcross, his friends, and his resident voices through the early 1980s—when things change for the worse as an age of materialism seems to override an age that fostered various types of spirituality.

Did I say “resident voices?” Well yes. Aubrey has been hearing voices since childhood, living with them, confiding in them, even learning from them. The primary voice, capable of positive influence, is Triple Suiter, affectionately called Trip. Other voices – or presences – are Amper Sand and a darker presence called Slim Hand. Traditional psychiatric medicine would call Aubrey’s condition schizophrenia, but Charles Porter is wary of this label to the point of suggesting that no treatment need be recommended. Aubrey is a fully functioning individual whose unconventional, unwilled, capacities extend rather than limit his sense of the world and his humanity.

Porter

He is a member of a community that not only tolerates him but finds him to be a steadying anchor. The gang that meets at the Blue Goose for nourishment and alcoholic refreshments – and every kind of narcotic – is a group given to excess. While some, like murdering vigilante Sonny, who stuffs his dead victims in refrigerators, are truly over the top, they are nonetheless reasonably loyal to one another. . . .

To read the entire review, as published in the August 8, 2018 Fort Myers Florida Weekly and the August 9 Naples, Bonita Springs, Charlotte County, and Palm Beach additions, click here: Florida Weekly – Flame Vine