This breathtakingly brilliant novel follows the multi-generational fortunes, and misfortunes, of a German-American family in the Ohio River Valley.  The narrator, Bear Schlumber, is the son of a proud mattress-store owning patriarch whose family has far more skeletons than closet space.  Even a cursory list of their pathologies is cringe-making, from Bear's long-term affair with his mother-in-law, which even her Alzheimer's and confinement to a nursing home has barely cooled; to his aunt's suicide; to sexual abuse; to murder.  And yet to label the Schlumber family strictly in terms of its moral squalor is to negate it.

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Tags: Wagner at Midnight, Katherine Guckenberger, ABNA Top 100 Semifinalist 2008