by John Cheever
“Are you hurt? I mean are you seriously hurt? Do you think we ought to go to the hospital?”
“No I’m all right. I have a headache and my eyes hurt but I’d rather go home.”
The papers carried the story. “Chain saw balks bizarre homicide. Eliot Nailles, of Chestnut Lane, Bullet Park, New York, cut his way through the locked door of Christ’s Church early last evening with a chain saw and succeeded in saving the life of his son, Anthony. Paul Hammer, also of Bullet Park, confessed to attempted homicide and was remanded to the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Hammer confessed to having kidnapped the young man from a dinner party given by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lewellen of Marlborough Circle. He carried Nailles to the church with the object of immolating him in the chancel. He intended, he claimed, to awaken the world.”
Tony went back to school on Monday and Nailles—drugged—went off to work and everything was as wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful as it had been.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 1991
Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969 by John Cheever
All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1969.
Chapter I first appeared in The New Yorker in different form. Chapters VI and XIV first appeared in Playboy magazine in different form.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cheever, John.
Bullet Park: a novel / by John Cheever.
—1st Vintage Books International ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76039-5
I. Title.
PS3505.H6428B8 1991
813′.52-dc20 91-55304
v3.0
