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Michael Morris
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Man in the Blue Moon Hardcover – August 17, 2012

by Michael Morris (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 182 ratings
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“He’s a gambler at best. A con artist at worst,” her aunt had said of the handlebar-mustached man who snatched Ella Wallace away from her dreams of studying art in France. Eighteen years later, that man has disappeared, leaving Ella alone and struggling to support her three sons. While the world is embroiled in World War I, Ella fights her own personal battle to keep the mystical Florida land that has been in her family for generations from the hands of an unscrupulous banker. When a mysterious man arrives at Ella’s door in an unconventional way, he convinces her he can help her avoid foreclosure, and a tenuous trust begins. But as the fight for Ella’s land intensifies, it becomes evident that things are not as they appear. Hypocrisy and murder soon shake the coastal town of Apalachicola and jeopardize Ella’s family.
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  1. Print length
    400 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
  4. Publication date
    August 17, 2012
  5. Dimensions
    6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1414373309
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1414373300
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Michael Morris is one of my favorite Southern writers..Man in the Blue Moon is a beautifully wrought portrayal of small town Southern life where poverty, tragedy, and human love engage in a ritualistic dance...one of the best portraits of a small Southern town I've ever encountered.." - Pat Conroy

"A Place Called Wiregrass and Slow Way Home were both showered with critical acclaim. His 2004 novella Live Like You Were Dying was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award...Look for Man in the Blue Moon to eclipse them all." (Florida Times Union)

Morris (Slow Way Home) has crafted a magical and mesmerizing page-turner rooted in hardscrabble Florida during WWI, based in part on a true family story. Ella Wallace is scrambling to keep her three sons and herself from the poorhouse after her opium-addicted husband vanishes. She owns a piece of land that reptilian banker Clive Gillespie, a spurned former suitor, would love to have, and he has leverage in the form of a mortgage on the property. But Ella finds an unexpected ally in her husband’s cousin Lanier Stillis, who arrives in unorthodox fashion and has some unusual talents, and the two collaborate until Lanier’s past catches up with him in a Shakespearean blaze of climactic action. Morris’s narrative is subtle and supple, with overtones of the wry Southernisms of Flannery O’Connor, the rural Florida backdrop of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and a good helping of powerful and mysterious faith. Book clubs should devour this rich, carefully observed mix of characters, time, and place; Morris deserves to break out of the regional-writer box. - Publishers Weekly

The reader may hear echoes of Harper Lee . . . or of Flannery O’Connor’s Southern grotesques . . . or even of Huck Finn. . . . But Morris has his own voice and his own story, and he tells it with uncommon skill and compassion. -Washington Post

Review

Michael Morris is a wonderful writer with a unique gift—he can break your heart and mend it, all in the same sentence. (Patti Callahan Henry, New York Times bestselling author)

Michael Morris has been one of my favorite Southern writers. His new novel is reason for great celebration—a beautifully wrought portrayal of small-town Southern life. Buy it. Read it. (Pat Conroy)

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.; First Edition (August 17, 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1414373309
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1414373300
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.35 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 182 ratings

About the author

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Michael Morris

Michael Morris

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Man in the Blue Moon is Michael Morris' fourth novel and it was named a Best Book of 2012 by Publishers Weekly. He is also the author of the award winning novel, A Place Called Wiregrass, and Slow Way Home, named one of the best novels of the year by the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the St. Louis Dispatch. His novella, Live Like You Were Dying, was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. A fifth-generation native of rural Florida, he currently resides in Alabama.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
182 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Lee McKinney
5.0 out of 5 stars Southern fiction at its best with a surprise twist, great ending
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2012
Verified Purchase
Eudora Welty wrote once that Southerners love a good tale...they are born reciters and great memory retainers, diary keepers and letter exchangers. Her words ring so true in this compelling story set in a remote area of North Florida, in the time after World War I, when the entire nation struggled to survive and dreams were put on the back shelf. Abandoned by her husband, living in a small, dying town, bank foreclosure imminent, the main character becomes someone you care for and understand also.

I had an hour to spare and thought I would just begin Man in the Blue Moon on my Kindle Fire. I could not put it down until it was finished, with a very satistying conclusion too. I can still see in my mind each of the characters, vivid, believable and compelling.

There is a big plot twist, too, tucked in here that I wont divulge. Just say it is based on the author's own grandfather's tale of a true event from his childhood. This big wooden crate arrives with a handlettered sign - this end up. Supposedly its a grandfather clock. From there, the story takes you to that small town and you are happy you came there to see it all happen.

Author Michael Morris has that rare gift of telling a good story and telling it well. Man in the Moon is a pleasure to read from start to finish. I recommend this as a great book for most everyone.

I am an avid and eclectic Kindle reader, and always looking for the next great read. Here it is.
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KarenZach
4.0 out of 5 stars Q & A with Author Michael Morris
Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2012
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So who does Pat Conroy read when he's in the mood for a good story? Michael Morris. Conroy calls Morris one of his favorite Southern writers. Man in the Blue Moon, Morris's latest, "is reason for great celebration -a beautifully wrought portrayal of small-town Southern life," says Conroy. Publishers Weekly praises Man in the Blue Moon as the perfect book club read.

It was Morris's grandfather who first told the young boy about a man being shipped to town inside of a box. Listen in as author Karen Spears Zacharias chats with Michael Morris about his grandfather and the stories that birth writers.

KAREN: The genesis for Man in the Blue Moon was a story your grandfather told you. Tell us about your grandfather.

MICHAEL: My grandfather was a character and of course everybody in the south knows what that means. He was absolutely the best storyteller I've known. In fact, he was so good at it that you might have to get him to tell the story two or three times to discern fact from fiction. When any discrepancies were brought to his attention he would shrug and say, "well, I was just trying to dress it up a little bit."

One story that he always told was of a man who was shipped in a crate to his family in Florida. The man was a distant cousin and his in-laws were out to kill him. They blamed him for the death of his wife and her lover. Even though the man had been exonerated of the crime, his former in-laws were powerful people and were seeking their own form of justice. My grandfather said that their father told them not to ask any questions. The man stayed on the property for about three months and then one day vanished. Years later my grandfather discovered that the man had moved to Vero Beach and made a new life for himself.

As a child, I was always fascinated by that story and then as an adult, I knew I had to write it. I started outlining the novel on my grandfather's 99th birthday. I am glad that he lived long enough to see the manuscript completed. Man in the Blue Moon is dedicated to his memory.

KAREN: The man in the box, Lanier, is said to possess the gift of healing. Who has played the part of the healer in your own life?

MICHAEL: The portrayal of Lanier's healing ability can be attributed back to my grandfather too. He had the Foxfire series that chronicles the people of the North Georgia Mountains. In one of the books there is a section about those from Appalachia who are believed to have the ability to cure certain ailments like thrush or even the ability to pull fire out of someone who has been burned. Reading Foxfire helped me to develop the character of Lanier.

While I have not had physical healing, I have certainly had emotional healing. My mom and I fled an abusive household and lived in a trailer steps behind my grandparent's home. While my mom went to vocational school to learn a trade to support us, my grandmother went to work on me. Every afternoon after lunch she would have me list out all the people in my life who loved me. If I forgot a cousin or great-aunt, she would remind me and have me to include them the next day. She helped to heal the scars to my soul. She had an eighth grade education but she remains the wisest person I've known. She died twenty-six years ago and there is not a day that goes by that I don't think of her.

KAREN: Ruby is one of my favorite characters in the entire story. Something about her vulnerability makes my heart soar and lament at the same time. When did Ruby first present herself to you?

MICHAEL: Ruby was a fun character to write. She came about as a result of a conversation I had with a woman at a book festival. Like me, the woman had grown up in a small town in North Florida. Somehow we started talking about the interesting, eccentric characters in small towns - not the eccentrics of today who blend in with the community but those who stood out and held court. The woman at the festival shared that there was a young girl in her hometown who would prance down Main Street once a week, twirling a baton and leading an imaginary parade. Cars would pull over and wait for her to complete her journey. The vision of this girl, who many in the town probably discounted even though she had this power over them, captivated my imagination. I could not get her and her parade out of my head. The idea for Ruby then came into being.

KAREN: Do you sketch out the plot or the characters in advance? And if so, which do you do first?

MICHAEL: Typically I will sketch out the characters first. I have a list of questions I answer about each character - everything from their favorite color to what is the darkest secret they are keeping. Of course, not all of the information will make it into the novel but it helps me to know the characters inside and out and to hopefully make them come alive on paper. Then I scratch out an outline of the story. I write one or two sentences about different scenes and places where I see the story turning. I tell people that for me the outline is like a map. When I'm writing a novel I will go back and look at the outline but that doesn't mean I don't take side trips and venture into other areas I hadn't planned.

KAREN: Brother Mabry is such a low-down dirty-dog greedy scoundrel but I know you are a man of deep faith. So why did you make the preacher the bad guy?

MICHAEL: When I was researching the novel I uncovered something that took me on one of those side journeys with plotting that I just mentioned. In the early 1940s there was a preacher who tried to make the claim that the part of Florida I am writing about in Man in the Blue Moon was the original Garden of Eden. Of course, his claim never took off but I couldn't resist using that whole idea as an element to the story. During 1918 when Man in the Blue Moon is set, there were spas centered around springs that were thought to provide medicinal healing.

Brother Mabry is a nationally known radio evangelist from New York and he sets his sights on developing a similar retreat on Ella's property. He plays a crucial role in the battle Ella is fighting to keep her property. To me Brother Mabry is a P.T. Barnum type of character who might have started out with good intentions but got swept up in greed. And of course, we still have those types of evangelists in our culture today. However, the community minister, Reverend Simpson, becomes the one who finally stops the persecution Lanier faces when Brother Mabry tries to exploit Lanier's ability to heal. I wanted to present a balance in the story - the good and the bad in society, even in religion.

KAREN: One of my favorite scenes in the book is when Bonaparte and the neighbor men come across Ella's field with their rusty saws in hand, to help cut the cypress. Their actions really speak to what community ought to look like, what it means to be a neighbor to one another. It reminded me of the way the folks in Cullman, Alabama pulled together following the devastating tornado in 2011 that cut a swath through town. What's your thoughts about the way we do community nowadays?

MICHAEL: For some reason there is a common theme woven in all of my novels that family is more than blood kin, it's also the people in the community who stand up and help us when we are going through difficulties. I certainly experienced that in the town I grew up in - a town not unlike Dead Lakes where Ella lives in Man in the Blue Moon.

It's interesting that you bring up the way the people in Alabama came together when the tornados tore apart the state last year. I was talking to a man the other day about it and he pointed out that sometimes we might wave to our neighbors as we pass by their homes but when there is devastation that is when we really get to know them. A friend recently made the comment that Facebook is the new "front porch" where folks would gather in the afternoons to escape the heat and visit with their neighbors. I see people chatting back and forth on Facebook and they only live a couple of miles from one another. It keeps a dialogue going about the latest news in the town. I just hope it never replaces that face to face companionship that is so needed when tragedy, sickness or death show up at someone's doorstep.

KAREN: You and I have both grown up with strong mothers, women whom others have viewed as vulnerable because they didn't have husbands in their lives taking care of them, or helping them care for children. Like our own mothers, Ella has to battle against the notion that a woman is incapable of handling her own affairs successfully. And yet Neva Clarkson looks at Ella and sees a survivor. When did you come to recognize your own mother as a survivor?

MICHAEL: Ella grows as a character and I purposefully put the woman's suffrage movement as a backdrop in the novel. While Ella is changing, the world around her is changing too. At the beginning at the novel when she received the foreclosure notice for her property, she feels that she can barely stand. She has always deepened on someone else to protect her and now she must protect herself and her sons. Although Ella's battle to keep her land makes her realize that she is stronger than she believes, those around her see the transformation long before she does. Her friend, Neva Clarkson, is the first person to point it out.

I grew up around strong women. My mother, grandmother, and great-aunt were all strong women in different ways. After my mom and I fled my abusive father, she took a low paying job as a typist and still managed to save twenty dollars a week for my education. She was determined that I would be the first in our family to graduate college. My wife says that she cannot picture my mother being hit by a man, thinking that the woman she knows today would take down any man who assaulted her. But like Ella, my mom evolved. And like Ella, she didn't give up. She fought to make a better way for us.

KAREN: When did you know that you would write Man in the Blue Moon?

MICHAEL: As a boy I was always captivated by the story of the man in the box that my grandfather used to tell. I would ask question after question. In fact, my grandfather said that his father told the children not to ask any questions about the man's arrival in a box. I don't think I would have fared to well in that time period!

After writing A Place Called Wiregrass and Slow Way Home I would visit bookstores and book festivals and the question I most often got was "did you always want to be a writer?" I really wish that I could say yes, but I didn't consider writing until I was 32 and working in the pharmaceutical industry. After pondering the question, I came to realize that while I was not a reader or around readers, I was around storytellers. My grandfather chief among them. I then came to understand that my grandparents had led me to become a writer. All of those stories I heard as a child and pictured in my head were stories to be mined and written. I felt that I just had to explore the story and see where it led.

KAREN: Once you knew that you wanted to tell this story, how did you go about getting it down? Did you research first or just start writing?

MICHAEL: I started out by interviewing my grandfather, not only about all the details surrounding the man who was shipped in a crate, but day to day life for them living in a crossroads community in the Panhandle of Florida. I asked him what their town celebrations were like and about their trips to Panama City or Apalachicola. He talked about the way that they used to raft timber to market. All of these elements made the time and place come to life for me. Man in the Blue Moon is truly a novel based on oral history.

I also did a great deal of research reading about the time period: World War I, the woman's suffrage movement and the 1918 flu epidemic. I sought out books about Apalachicola's history and the South's role in the war and the suffrage movement. Documentaries about these topics were helpful, particularly a PBS documentary on the flu that included survivor stories.

I'll tell you how great libraries are. I was all set to travel to the University of Florida to spend time reading the 1918 Apalachicola, Florida newspapers. The Birmingham Library was able to arrange a loan with the university and the newspapers were sent on microfiche to Birmingham. I spent a couple of weeks combing through every issue. That was a big turning point for me in feeling that I was completely in the environment I was writing about. Through the newspaper searches, I was able to discover a claim that the area was considered by a few to be the original Garden of Eden and that the state was encouraging folks around Apalachicola to grow rice. Both of these elements became important parts of the story.

KAREN: What do you enjoy most about being a writer?

MICHAEL: I love how writing will transport me to another time and place. I love the days when it is going so well that my fingers feel like they can barely type fast enough to record the images and dialogue I am imagining. I also love it when a reader will tell me that she thought about the story or the characters long after the last page was finished. When I hear those words, I feel that I have done my job.

KAREN: What did writing Man in the Blue Moon teach you?

MICHAEL: Man in the Blue Moon taught me to appreciate my Florida Cracker heritage. It's funny because those of us from North Florida will often hear people tell us that we can't possibly have this thick of an accent and still be from Florida. In fact, one reviewer said until he read the novel he had never even thought of Florida as a Southern state. So I'm proud that I was able to capture a part of my family's story and to show a part of Old Florida that was hardscrabble - the part of Florida that my family helped to pioneer.

The novel also taught me the importance of tolerance and what a big issue that is still today. Lanier's ability to heal becomes a dividing force within the community and Brother Mabry uses it as a way to push his own agenda. There are a lot of topics in the novel that we are grappling with today - economic downturn, foreclosure, addiction and certainly tolerance of those we might not understand and those we disagree with.

KAREN: What's next?

MICHAEL: I'm really excited to hit the road and visit my SIBA friends with Man in the Blue Moon. We are going from town to town for about two months. SIBA really got behind my first novel, A Place Called Wiregrass, and I am so grateful for all of the support they have given me through the years.

I am also looking forward to my next novel, The King of Florabama, which is about the longest serving sheriff in Alabama who at 80 loses his license, his office and then has to come to terms with a hidden 40 year old murder that has divided his family.
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Janet M. Bank
3.0 out of 5 stars Three Stars
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2015
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This was a good story with an almost whimsical premise. It's worth the read.
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PlatinumEnglish
5.0 out of 5 stars Singing the Blues
Reviewed in the United States on September 10, 2012
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Singing the Blues

MAN IN THE BLUE MOON gives Michael Morris' readers his latest rendition of the Blues, and in the first verse of this song, we see again that a woman is singing them. Her name is Ella, an appropriate name for a singer of the Blues. We learn that she has had a dismal beginning in life but has a rare second chance with her Aunt Katherine, a dreamer, after losing her parents, a prostitute and a drunk. As with any good Blues melody, there is a disheartening turn of events. Ella falls prey to a gambling, drug-abusing snake named Harlan Wallace. They dance, and the union results in the births of three boys, a second mortgage on the land and store she had owned outright, his disappearance, her fear of homelessness, and a mysterious box from the Blue Moon Clock Company. We onlookers see, with a not inconsiderable degree of obviousness, that these are the ingredients for a cataclysmic Shakespearian fall.

The second verse of Ella's song does not disappoint. Lanier Stillis arrives encased in a box meant to house a grandfather clock. The mysterious box bears the name Blue Moon Clock Company, but Stillis emerges instead with his own song of sorrow. All of the craziness that he is seeking to escape took place in Georgia--Flannery O'Connor would approve. Lanier is on the run from his brothers-in-law for the murder of his wife. They have something that belongs to him--a piece of his ear, and like bloodhounds, they follow his scent to get revenge, even though he has been acquitted of the murder by a judge and jury. He has also inherited the ability to heal the sick, which makes him an overnight sensation in the community of Dead Lakes, Florida. The townspeople of neighboring Apalachicola, after hearing of his miraculous powers, put him on trial again, accusing him of black magic and being in cahoots with Lucifer. To Ella, though, he is a savior who has healed her son and others, and he shores up her life by giving her hope and courage. She can see herself in him; they are both artists and close to nature. Both are rudderless, however, and believe they are cursed by the sins of their parents, and both have abandonment issues.

The third verse of this refrain becomes white noise as the forces around Ella threaten to blare her into non-existence. Narsissa, a Creek Indian living in a shack behind Ella's store, is not unacquainted with misery herself, having been abandoned by her husband. She and Ella bond in that respect, but Narsissa constantly harps on the same string, warning of disaster she is sure follows Lanier. Her presence is a constant reminder of the blues they share as women. In addition to Narsissa's never-ending harassment, Clive Gillespie, who owns the bank and almost everything and everyone else in town, haunts her dreams and threatens her very existence by promising to foreclose on her property if she does not pay her overdue mortgage. He is harboring a long-term grudge because Ella and her land were snaked away from him by her worthless husband.

The last verse deals with the magical, healing spring found on Ella's property. Like any water that ripples when a stone is tossed into it, this spring soon ripples with negative energy and seems to lose its power to heal. Also like most woodland springs, it has its share of snakes. When Reverend Alfred Mabry arrives in town with his wife Priscilla, who is ill and needs the spring to revive her, the story reaches a boiling point that no amount of water can slake. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, neither the Apalachicola River nor the spring offer any aid, miraculous healing, or escape from reality and the problems that follow every human being. Unfortunately, there is no "Eden Everlasting" here on earth, as Rev. Mabry suggests, and he has to surrender his dream of a cure for his wife's cancer and a resort that offers hope to ailing visitors. As Eden was abandoned so was the hope of offering physical and spiritual nurturing from the spring in Dead Lakes. My favorite disruptor in the novel is the child-like Ruby--the audacious--the mentally challenged--the leader of fake parades--the institutionalized glorious Ruby. She eventually leads the town to comprehend the nature of a true viper embodied in Clive Gillespie. She stands up at a tent revival and declares him to be the father of her unborn child.

We need to raise a glass to Michael Morris, the maestro. I thank him for glorifying strong, sensational women who seem to be mired in concrete while fighting almost insurmountable odds. They are brave, enduring the most difficult hardships. My inclination is to sit down and devour a good book like a sinfully delicious dessert, but I savored every word of this one, shadowing the characters as they moved through the pages. Like every great song, I want to play it again and listen carefully to the words. After all, the Blues, like an interpretive piece of literature, teaches us how to better deal with our own problems. Music can have restorative power, whether sung or written, and can offer hope and escape from our troubled lives. As we have seen all too often, evil has a way of snaking into our lives, and we sometimes punish out of ignorance and fear those we do not understand because they are different from us with beliefs that are different from our own, atrocities such as the Salem Witch Trials a distant though visceral memory. Michael Morris shines a light through the power of his writing on those vigilantes living in our times. My hope is that you read and learn from his simply eloquent narrative.

My favorite quote in the novel states, "People [are] in the world not just to observe but to impact." Michael Morris is a living testament to that philosophy.
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