The Black Train

After devouring all but 40 pages in under a month, Edward Lee’s The Black Train sat on my shelf for just over a year. I blame the urine.

Page one sees a drunken rail worker dismember a prostitute and rub his groin with her severed hand. The scene isn’t relevant to the story, but it serves as a bellwether for what follows.

We follow Justin Collier, a celebrity chef and TV personality who retreats to the small town of Gast, Tennessee. Collier checks into an inn which once housed Harwood Gast, a Civil War—era tycoon. Under the guise of supplying the Confederate army, Gast poured his fortune into building a railroad. Once operational, the railroad transported thousands to makeshift death camps Gast constructed. Unfortunately, Lee never explains Gast’s motives, which goes to why I left the book unfinished for so long: it has no ending. It reads like a better book’s prologue.

Lee repeats the same scenario: Collier finds himself sexually excited by something taboo tinged with the supernatural, smells urine, and fights through his baser instincts. The urine thing, in particular, gets old fast. Lee’s characters are slapped, slammed, smothered, and assaulted by the stench. What begins as edgy devolves into monotonous. The Black Train isn’t an awful book, but less piss and more plot would have helped.