“Sometimes, there’s a fine line between strongly held belief and irrational obsession. The Hanged Man (Signature Editions), by Don Bapst, is a novel about mad obsession and mysterious forces. It takes as its starting point the origins and perceived power of tarot cards.
  
The main character, Glen Harrison, is a student of art history with an interest in the tarot. In particular, he’s fascinated by the cards of the famed Visconti-Sforza deck, a spectacular set of art objects, lavishly decorated trifles for members of the Italian nobility. Dating from the mid-15th century, most of the remaining cards are now held in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City.
   
Harrison is trying to convince his faculty advisor that the origins of the tarot would make a suitable thesis topic. He believes that the cards are rooted in West African religious traditions, but his advisor, and the academic world in general, are unconvinced. To them, the cards are a source of amusement, nothing more.
   
Harrison, though, believes that the cards have some sort of spiritual purpose. And so begins his quest which takes him to some very unfamiliar places and involves mysterious occurrences.
   
Bapst sets the unsettling tone with the opening scene at the Morgan Library. As a student, Harrison is allowed to view just four of the cards, displayed by a librarian wearing white gloves. The cards themselves are in protective sleeves. The whole process is off-putting and strange, and that atmosphere steadily increases as Harrison goes further into his obsession.
 
He becomes convinced that minor incidents or coincidences are actually laden with meaning. A woman he meets, an illness in his family: everything comes back to the tarot.
   
At the end of the book, Harrison finds his way to Burkina Faso in West Africa. From the capital of Ouagadougou, he works his way to a remote village. Things there get very odd indeed.
   
Unfortunately, this section of the novel feels a little rushed. These pages are vividly realized — the author has lived in Ouagadougou — and this is one of those rare times I wish a novel was a little longer.
   
The book is illustrated with cards from the Visconti-Sforza deck introducing each chapter, complete with readings based on the cards. Throughout the novel, Harrison increasingly finds himself in strange and stranger situations. In this intriguing and tense novel, though, much of that strangeness is Harrison’s own creation.”

— Quentin Mills-Fenn Uptown Magazine

“Methods of divination can be found in every human culture; even in the twenty first century, there are weather apps for predicting the immediate future in terms of sun and rain—in fact, if earthquakes had even the probability factors of hurricanes, the application developer would find fame for sure. Of these methods of divination, the tarot is well recognized, and a plethora of mutations can be found to entrance the individual. Owners of these decks use them as an aide for meditation on their life choices, generally, and their choice for which deck to use has a number of inchoate influences, including the quality of the art used to depict the various symbols.  In his novel, The Hanged Man, the primary persona  seeks to understand the art itself, the history of the tarot as a work of art –particularly of the Visconti- Sforza deck, “those  exquisitely gilded paper rectangles commissioned by Italian nobles and handcrafted by court artists in the 15th century”(9)—and while this search propels the plot of the  novel, there is more at work in Bapst’s elegant and delightful book.

Existing as entries in an invented journal, the narrative takes place in the last months of the twentieth century, when millennial prognostication included various forms of Armageddon, including the Y2K bruha. In addition to this structural device, Bapst includes reproductions of fifteen tarot cards and interpretations of these cards that can be read as interpretations by both the protagonist, Glen Harrison, and by author Bapst himself.  One wonders if the chapter numbers align to the numbers on the cards themselves, as many tarot decks include numbers on the cards (and those versed with numerology as divination –rather than as a principle of engineering—can gain as much from the associated numerical meanings as they can the depicted symbols). The cards introducing each chapter are referred to in the text as ones the protagonist references; the reader understands that the character is both researching the tarot and using readings from the tarot himself. Thus, the novel is doubly structured as both the musings of the character and as musings on the implication of the tarot cards.

Amusement is a key aspect in this book, as a wry humor pervades throughout. This is not the type of horror novel that focuses on an escalation of the overtly grotesque, but Bapst’s deft use of suspense creates that anxiety so true to the horror genre. In the scene where the protagonist seeks a tarot reading  from a mysteriously discovered psychic, he muses on the little known neighborhood of Tottenville on Staten Island, and says “Never had it occurred to me that New York’s  most forgotten borough was actually bigger then Manhattan” ( 75), and later discovers “ a series of homes—not much more than shacks, really—were hidden from the street in a tangle of trees and bushes. Junked auto parts littered the lawns”(77). Anyone familiar with modern horror films will recognize this trope as one signifying impending conflict, and Bapst himself, as also an award-winning filmmaker,  uses this setting to increase the emotional turmoil of both the character and the reader.

Another suspenseful element in the structure are the recordings of the protagonist’s reoccurring dream, which become longer and more involved over time. The scenery of the dream involves a hospital, and a secondary character in the novel, Glen’s mother, adds depth to the plot with her struggle against cancer while her son struggles in his graduate thesis over the tarot. While there are hospital scenes outside the dream in the novel, hospitals are generally harrowing places. Ironically, the childhood memory of a discovered tarot deck fuels the character’s interest, and the matter-of-fact childhood memories that are the fodder for journals everywhere become yet another layer to this novel’s plot. After awhile, symbols become more overt in the text, and the dream involves both the symbol of the tower in the tarot card and the symbol of a tower falling in the protagonist’s chronic dream.

What saves this novel from being potentially pulpy is Bapst’s exquisite control: the journal entries are told in the colloquial standard American English, with only some sensitive turns of phrase to clue the reader that the journals are a construct. There’s also elements of humor that for many readers will go undetected: A reference is made to “ a G Wittkop  who telephoned”(168), but readers of the author’s bio will notice that Bapst translated Gabrielle Wittkop’s novel The Necrophiliac from the French in 2011. The novel includes two afterwords, as if the journals were the actual work of the protagonist, but again, these are Bapst having his way with us.

For those for whom the tarot is a serious, sacred ritual, Bapst’s book will  seem transgressive; for those for whom horror must have ooze and monsters, Bapst’s book might be too lighthearted; nonetheless, for any one with the brains to appreciate deft humor and an elegantly symphonic structure, Bapst’s novel The Hanged Man is a must read.”

— Su Zi The Gypsy Art Show