Stephen King is best known for his horror novels. Tom Perrotta is not. He doesn’t write horror novels. He writes literary fiction that specializes in the ennui and quiet tragedies of life in the modern American suburb, at least that’s what he had been writing until now. In 2004, for instance, The New York Times Book Review compared Perrotta with Chekhov.  I’m not under the impression that anyone has compared Stephen King’s work, powerful as it can be, to the rather challenging, high brow legend of the short story, Anton Chekhov. And yet it made perfect sense to me when I heard that it was King himself who had chosen to write the upcoming New York Times Book Review piece on The Leftovers a book I’ll not hold off a sentence longer from saying could be one of this year’s blockbusters.

Though I doubt anyone has previously compared Stephen King with Tom Perrotta, the two authors do share a kind of luck. Beyond having published work that sells rather well (or, in King’s case, extraordinarily well – 350 million books sold and counting), both seem to write stories that translate naturally to the screen, big and small. Two of Perrotta’s first five novels were made into films, both of which were Oscar nominated, the one a stark and penetrating melodrama about suburban life starring Kate Winslet (“Little Children”), the other a satire on politics and popularity that starred Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick (“Election”), and that Perrotta himself helped adapt into a screenplay.

Now comes Perrotta’s latest novel.

Even before it has hit the shelves, Variety has reported that HBO, that juggernaut of cable television, is developing a series based on The Leftovers, a gripping tale that focuses on Mapleton, a rather picturesque American town dealing, or trying to deal, with the aftermath of a massive scale disaster. Millions upon millions of people around the world have suddenly disappeared – gone for good – in an event the book and the characters in it refer to as The Rapture. Had Stephen King written it, the book would probably have been called “The Rapture” and told a markedly different story, one that would likely have placed the Rapture itself as the climatic centre of the story.

Closer then, at least in terms of focus, to Cormac McCarthy’s masterwork “The Road,” which is exclusively concerned with a post-apocalyptic story of survival rather than the apocalypse itself, The Leftovers does not attempt to explain how the disaster happened or why. Nothing explodes. No blood is shown. No screams resound. In fact the victims of The Rapture, who have disappeared off the face of the earth forever, are never seen in this story, only referred back to. The actual event of their disappearing is never shown, even briefly. It has already happened. It is in the past. It is not what this story is about.

That all of the characters in the novel refer to the disaster as a Rapture is, however, of course significant to the story, the religious consequences, or more often the lack thereof, are a big part of what Perrotta wants to explore. One of the novel’s most intriguing conceits is the founding of a cult-like organization known as “The Guilty Remnant” who come into existence as a result of (trying to deal with) The Rapture. Once initiated, the cult members, of whom one of the story’s central characters becomes a member, take a vow of silence and walk the cities and towns of America wearing only white, watching in voiceless judgment over the people of their communities. Haunting the people of Mapleton these cult-like mutes shadow characters as they walk home at night, as they amble through their local grocery store, as they try to get on with their lives.

Not Stephen King gory, nor Cormac McCarthy dismal, however; The Leftovers takes place in a present-day world much like our own, where sun is allowed to shine by day, and people are allowed to at least try and get on with rebuilding their lives. As with his previous novels, Perrotta knows where his strengths lie and he sets his story in the seemingly safe suburban world of shopping malls and Italian restaurants that existed before, as we see from a variety of angles, the story told in turn from the perspective of the town’s mayor, his college-aged son, his rather lost teenage daughter and his estranged wife, every character broken and scarred in their own way.

Why Stephen King came to mind a number of times while reading Perrotta’s very readable novel is not just because of the ominous feeling instilled in the reader throughout this page-turner of a literary work. It must be said that with The Leftovers, Perrotta has made a big leap from his previous books, painting on a far larger canvas than ever before, and the tension and intrigue that The Rapture’s remnants add to his tale of suburban life is a rather remarkable feat, not to mention one heck of a clever narrative conceit. What’s more, to those not familiar with King, one of the horror legend’s masterstrokes is his ability to paint small town life in America, in particular his ear for the blue collar Average Joe, without which none of his great novels would be half as effective. Perrotta too has that remarkable ability to put you squarely into a small town America that feels wholly realized with real, breathing characters, albeit a more middle-class selection of characters, but still. And though the horrors and dramas in “The Leftovers” are not of the gory variety, the tension is ramped up all the more by the realism of the scene Perrotta sets.

With prose that’s never showy and dialogue that always sounds just right, Perrotta has the deft touch – again like King – to make it feel like he’s writing about your friends and neighbours. But the greatest coup Perrotta pulls off with The Leftovers is that by framing his story as a near science-fiction tale of post mysterious disaster dealings, his naturalistic, literary tale of how people come to deal with death, manages to read at the same time, as a riveting suspense story about survival.

****

FOR FURTHER READING:

Tom Perrotta’s Little Children

Stephen King’s Different Seasons

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom