Author William Frank makes much of its wayward nature, but in fact THE GRAVE LISTENERS has a distinctly picaresque feel. The setting is the medieval period; the location is a village somewhere in eastern Europe going by the profusion of pseudo-Slavic-sounding names. The protagonist, Volushka, is a reprobate – a brothel-frequenting drunk who is the village’s “grave listener”, a man whose job is to camp out at the freshly dug grave of the deceased with a listening horn, checking that no-one has been buried alive by mistake. He preserves his sobriety for those occasions on which he has to agree a fee for his services with the bereaved, at which time his patter, which would rival a salesman’s, comes to the fore. The position is a hated one; indeed, there are obvious parallels between Volushka and the “sin eaters” who, in real life, were likewise outcasts and marginal figures, brought in to consume the sins of the recently departed (represented in the form of a small cake), a tradition that died out in the Celtic countries in the nineteenth century.
The story’s focus is firmly on Volushka, a rival to Falstaff for tall tales and fecklessness. He is, after his fashion, getting on with his life of debauchery and hanging around in graveyards when a stranger, Marcabrusa – equally apt with words, but more well-heeled and handsome – arrives in the village and promptly usurps Volushka’s position, in spite of the fact that he, as Volushka ruefully notes, “doesn’t have the birthright”. Before long, he seeks out a supernatural remedy for his woes. Though the setting is medieval, Frank is uninterested in faithfulness to the period; the node of speech is contemporary, and at times one feels a distinctly metamodern contempt for verisimilitude. The action borders on farce in the traditional sense, and the sex scenes, being infused with witchery, macabre, and (to put it mildly) some role reversal, are a hoot if one has the stomach for them.
The main issues derive from the story’s esthetics and characterization. Volushka’s confidant Benzi is far too erudite, wisecracking, and quick on his feet for a five-year-old boy, and the regular two-handers between him and Volushka, though doubtless intended to provide the listener with a comic foil, merely grate after a while. The dialog is curiously undifferentiated, with a good chunk of the main characters speaking in the same brusque tone, replete with exclamation points. But THE GRAVE LISTENERS moves along at a fair pace, and there is a certain amusement in watching one of life’s unapologetic dissolutes struggling to hold his own; one simultaneously hopes that he prevails, and also that he falls flat on his face – as, incidentally, he so often does.
For all its brevity, William Frank’s THE GRAVE LISTENERS is an ambitious, floridly written book that, although lacking in some particulars, offers a lively, farcical take on the life of an incorrigible layabout.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader