Richmond's Style Weekly, 10/19/05

Chekhov would be pleased with Virginia Tech professor Edward Falco’s “Wolf Point” (Unbridled Books, $23.95). As Falco tantalizes the reader with the promise of sex and murder in the first act, by the last he has not failed to deliver. The character around which the plot revolves is T. Aloysius Walker, an intellectual mixture of Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen, without any of the humor but all of the lechery. A sexy young temptress in red leather pants and her deadbeat guitar-toting boyfriend lure T into picking them up off the side of the road and taking them to a semi-deserted cabin called Wolf Point. The fact that T fails to drop this clichéd duo when he discovers their goal is to rob and kill him is what drives the plot beyond the first chapter. The dangerous hitchhikers, the unkempt cabin in the woods and the foggy, misted-over river encircling the scene draw to mind a combination of a classic horror film and a bad joke.

The onslaught of this reckless scenario is tempered with musings on one man’s history of love, failure, seduction and sexual deviancy. T’s sudden thrust from isolation into the wild unknown by joining paths with explosive strangers results in a story that is difficult to put down but equally difficult to love. — Valley Haggard