The Night Gwen Stacy Died: A Novel

Sarah Bruni

Jul 2013 · Sold by HMH

About this ebook

“Part tangled love story and part love affair with comics . . . centers on that tenuous bit of time between childhood and adulthood, when anything seems possible.” —Library Journal

Sheila Gower will do anything to get away from small-town nowhere Iowa and her dead-end swing-shift job at a gas station. Right now, all she has is her dreams. So does the cute young stranger who calls himself Peter Parker—a daredevil cabdriver with an immersive Spider-Man obsession, a gun, and a plan: They’ll fake a kidnapping, empty the register, and head for Chicago to complete a mysterious mission. Sheila thinks it’s a marvel of an idea. Until the colorful rush of their fantasy getaway collides with reality.
 
“The literary equivalent of a pop music mashup . . . Inspired by ‘Spider-Man,’ Westerns, coming-of-age novels and Bonnie and Clyde” (Chicago Tribune), The Night Gwen Stacy Died is both “superbly suspenseful” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) and “sweetly eccentric” (The New York Times)—a love story about loss, mutual rescue, and finding our real identities.

Ratings and reviews

I enjoyed it. It is not the best book ever made. And there will be times where you ask yourself "What the hell am I reading?" But it is still a very endearing book, with heavy themes of acceptance and identity. The Spider-Man references are a treat for any Spider-Man fan.

If you like neat, cookie-cutter stories, don't read this. It's got a very organic, immersive writing style that not all people will like but that I love. The story on the surface is weird, but makes perfect sense in a meditative, abstract way. It's an interesting look at different ways that reality/our perspective gets shaped and how that in turn shapes our lives. I really liked it, but I can get people not liking it.

The story is not told in a straight line or by one narrator. As in life, different people view events through their own lens; each reader will take something different from this novel. Very much worth reading.

About the author

Sarah Bruni is a graduate of the MFA program in fiction writing at Washington University in St. Louis and holds a degree in English literature from the University of Iowa. Since growing up in and around Chicago, she has taught creative writing in St. Louis and volunteered as a writing and English tutor with youth in San Francisco and Montevideo, Uruguay. The Night Gwen Stacy Died is Bruni’s first novel.