A Place in the Dark/The Glamour of Evil — Frank Lentricchia

This is a flip book with two novels: A Place In The Dark braids history, fiction and politics. It is set in Utica with substantial passages of painful, site-specific memories of the characters of both the Vietnam war and the American engagement in Iraq. These memories are carried by a Vietnamese immigrant woman living in Utica, who suffered in Saigon, an American Marine and Italian-American Utican who committed an atrocity during the siege of Khe Sanh, and an Iraqi who administered torture and worked as translator and interpreter in Baghdad on America's behalf. The Glamour of Evil deals with how, some males, especially literary/intellectual types, are drawn to violent men in organized crime; and secretly desire intimacy with such people whom they find charismatic, powerful and uniquely free inside a world where the freedom of the individual is in much doubt. The novel features a legendary American Mafioso, Crazy Joey Gallo and his dark world. This is combined with a whodunit involving Eliot Conte's daughter, a crisis that a connected man of literary flair promises to resolve for Conte for an unusual price.