Mortal Leap

What a big, strange, good book the folks at Boiler House Press have recovered. Harris published nearly twenty inventive and eclectic novels between 1961 and 1993, nearly all out of print now. This one, his second, is advertised as a kind of existential story of one man slipping into the identity of another—and it is, fascinatingly so—but (spoiler!) it takes half of a meaty book to get there, after an equally compelling hundred-plus pages of a gritty below-decks sailor's tale that could have been written by B. Traven. It's the messiness of its disparate parts, and Harris's unwillingness to stick to the story you think he's going to tell, that makes this such a compelling and thought-provoking yarn.