BUNYAN AND HENRY; OR, THE BEAUTIFUL DESTINY

Two American folk heroes join forces in the name of democracy.

Cecil’s sprightly debut is an adventure tale set around the late 1800s, but it retools the Paul Bunyan and John Henry myths with an eye on today’s postcapitalist hellscape. Bunyan is a stout laborer in a polluted company town mining a fuel called Lump; when his wife, Lucette, is poisoned by Lump runoff, he’s compelled to head to “the Windy City” and appeal to the company CEO, the cartoonish (and nakedly Trumpish) industrialist El Boffo, who’s using Lump to develop an all-healing device. But access to El Boffo requires that the gentle giant defeat all comers in a boxing ring. He battles his final adversary, steel-driver John Henry, to a draw; realizing they’re better off working together, they scheme to find a cure for Lucette and a way to bring Henry’s family to Canada and escape slave catchers. They have the assistance of a folk creature’s vague advice and a literal guiding light called the Gleam that will deliver the pair to the title’s “Beautiful Destiny.” Cecil has plainly inhaled not just the details of the Bunyan and Henry myths but the hyperbolic rhetoric of adventure tales; the novel is rife with cliffhanger chapter endings and feats of derring-do. That makes it a likable page-turner, but also a predictable one. The story is peppered with platitudes about capitalism (“Nothing lives in America unless it turns a profit, and nothing dies as long as it does”), and El Boffo’s character is so nakedly villainous that his machinations (and fate) become uninteresting. The idea of using two idealized American folk characters to show how short the country has fallen is an inspired one with lots of potential, but here it’s mostly serving a binary good-versus-evil melodrama.

Durable characters, set in a new but familiar frame.