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We all have our fantasies. Not delusions, but rather the comforting illusions we wrap around ourselves like big, warm blankets. It's how we deal with the harsher realities of life, the inescapable truths that can weigh so heavily on the psyche. These illusions are the sieves through which we squeeze the real world. What's left is our own personal Disneyland, a theme park to which we can retreat when the contemplation of the next big hill on the roller coaster of real life becomes too taxing.
And so it is with Doc Kane, the protagonist in Alexander Parson's steamroller of a first novel, LEAVING DISNEYLAND. As the novel opens, Doc is a resident of another Disneyland, the ironic nickname for Tyburn Penitentiary, a hellhole in the middle of the Nevada desert. Doc is days away from possible parole after serving 16 years of a 20-year sentence for the shotgun slaying of his daughter's violently abusive husband.
Parson's depiction of life inside the prison is as frightening as it is compelling. It is a world driven by the ecology of violence, Darwinism demonstrated time and again in a miserable concrete Petri dish. This is Doc's world, a world he wants desperately to leave, yet a world that, after 16 years, offers the comfort of familiarity, the security of routine, and the certainty of a code of honor, however violent.
For Doc, the world outside the prison is another sort of Disneyland, a world of color saturated by the imagination of an inmate whose connections to family and friends have withered and died. The lure of this illusion is understandably powerful; it haunts Doc even as his own past haunts him.
When a young inmate arrives to take up residence as Doc's cellmate, Doc finds himself at odds with the very code to which he owes his survival. The newcomer, a drug dealing gang leader from Doc's hometown of Washington, D. C., is responsible for the murder of the brother of another Tyburn inmate, a member of the same gang to which Doc belongs. The code calls for blood, but the murder of his cellmate will jeopardize Doc's parole, his chance to trade one Disneyland for another.
Doc is as complex a character as you're likely to find in fiction, at once likable and frightening, driven alternately by the most admirable of human qualities and the darkest of passions. In telling Doc's story, Parsons has achieved something remarkable, something so believable yet so strange, something painfully, poignantly human. Doc's humanity transcends facile politics and easy sentimentality. What is left is fiction free of illusions, but warm-blooded and rich in the flawed, beautiful poetry of human existence.
--- Reviewed by Bob Rhubart
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