I have just finished reading The Candle Stick Maker by Dennis McDougal, a very strange ebook indeed, but enjoyable too I hasten to add.

Here is how it was described to me.  This is a reasonable enough description I suppose, but it sent me off on the wrong foot I have to admit:

“The Candlestickmaker” is about three boys who form a tight friendship when serving aboard the (fictional) USS Argosy during the Vietnam War.
Based partially on Mr. McDougal’s own experience in the Navy, it follows these young men who join only to find themselves pawns of another war being waged within the military. As their bond deepens so do their suspicions”.

Coming of Age…..  Perhaps….

It starts out as a sort of “coming of age” story about three young Americans who find themselves swept up in the war in Vietnam, and all end up on the same naval ship, an electronic espionage ship that sort of wanders around the seas off Vietnam, but never actually goes to Vietnam.

Whilst a number of the characters in the book seem rather odd, and things happen in the story that one wouldn’t really expect in a Coming of Age Vietnam War novel, it all moves along in a reasonably coherent fashion for about the first third of the book.  We get to know enough about the main characters lives before the war, and how they relate to their situation on the war ship and each other and  see them doing the sort of things that young military people do when far from home… bars, brothels, and so on…     All perfectly normal so far.

So, I settled down to continue to read what I decided would be a pretty standard book about the war in Vietnam, enjoyable enough, but nothing special I thought.

I was wrong!

This is a very strange book indeed, though its message is clear enough – I shan’t talk about that, as I do not wish to take away your pleasure when you read this book.   As I said, it slowly becomes a sort of child of Kafka and Joseph Heller (Catch 22) as weirder and weirder things began to happen, and as with those two authors, all the strange things that happen are taken calmly and in a matter of fact way by the main proponents of this book.

As with Catch 22 and Kafka, the internal logic of the world these young men inhabit is accepted with almost no question, even though from our point of view they are liviing in a totally crazy world.

People disappear, act in extremely odd ways, some have hallucinations and the whole ship seems to be a sort of floating insane asylum/horror film rolled into one, and things become very scary as more and more strange and nasty things occur and people die or go totally insane.

And all of this happens in an atmosphere of “nothing odd here’ which makes it all even more effective than if the main characters were running around trying to find out what on earth was happening to them.

The ending is also curious, but that you will have to read this splendid ebook to discover.

A good read:

I found this to be a very compelling and intriguing ebook, which I read with a sort of pleasure (it isn’t a comfortable book I mean by that), and one I would recommend to anyone who values reading books with a lot more going for them than the average thriller.

Please note:

In passing I would state that whilst there are elements of Catch 22 here, it lacks the humour of Catch 22, it is more like the final scenes in Catch 22.   This comparison is not meant in any way to suggest that this is a sort of Vietnam war rehash of Catch 22, it is absolutely not that.

Where to get it?

It is available as an ebook, but also as a paper book

Paper version: Amazon

Kindle version: Kindle Store:

How much will it cost?

Paper version: $13.99

Kindle version: $2.99

Author’s website:  http://www.dennismcdougal.com/

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