This is the Place

By Peter Rock

This Is the Place is the sinister story of an aged and lonely blackjack dealer living in Wendover, Nevada, who becomes obsessed with a nineteen-year-old Mormon girl from Bountiful, Utah.

Sixty-four-feet tall and made of metal, the neon giant Wendover Will stands in front of the Stateline casino in Wendover, Nevada and faces east. The sign under him reads "This Is The Place." Over a hundred miles away in Utah, across the salt flats, stands the statue of Brigham Young, atop his monument, proclaiming the same thing, "This Is The Place."

This Is The Place is a novel of love, perhaps doomed, told by an endearing misanthrope who may be delusional, but who has managed to coalesce his manias into an alternative understanding that lies somewhere between Wendover Will's depravity and Brigham Young's morality:

"The dispute between Will and Brigham is not for me to settle, nor would I want it settled. The words hang over the salt flats, the most forsaken stretch of earth, a terrifying expanse of sheer space, white, like another planet, hard and smooth where nothing can live. This all sounds so grim I've known joy and I'll know it again. It's just that it takes work to get up the words to talk about love."

His love leads him to do a terrible thing, and he tells this story to justify himself. His words, seductive and convincing, draw the reader into a world where the supernatural takes on new meaning. It is a haunting journey to the extreme realities of Las Vegas and Salt Lake City and many places in between. Above all, it is an odyssey to the depths of love.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385485980
• ISBN13: 9780385485982
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: Anchor Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A delightful, dangerously well-written novel.

I gave this book to my mother, and she was reading it in her car while stopped at red lights. The book's philosophical and racy passages are equally engaging; the descriptions of the landscape open spaces in your mind.

Great novel - I can't wait to read Carnival Wolves

The language is fast but takes on an emptiness that reflects the Nevada desert. The story is an interesting one with sudden twists (making crop circles, drag racing on the salt flats)and takes on a slightly religious tone towards the end, but not overly so that the author becomes self-indulgent. Funny, interesting, great characters, vivid descriptions. I highly recommend it.

A remarkable, lyrical book full of insight.

This remarkable book betrays a genius for language in a variety of places. Poetic and fast paced, it is as if keats had sat down to write king.

loved the book. boldy imagined and written. breaks the rules

I couldn't disagree more with the Kirkus review. This book breaks many conventions of fiction writing and sparkles because of it. From the moment those snakes are shocked out of their holes, this novel barrels forward with the breathless passion of its narrator, the old blackjack dealer. Anyone who knows writing knows from the richness and power in his voice that his love for Charlotte, though unexpected and selfish--as love often is--is real. I read the book in two rapt sittings. When the old man's mind's eye follows Charlotte and Keith through Las Vegas and the Nevada desert, I AM there with them, happily, sometimes eerily and in luscious discomfort. The novel's ending was entirly unsuspected and at once inevitable, which is perhaps a novel's highest praise; it takes an artist. But it's the passion and complexity of the old man's consciousness that makes this book the work of art it is, a book I would love to say that I had written. Rock is the man.

Do Utah and Nevada really need each other?

The depravity of Nevada with its casinos and showgirls is set against the morality (???) and starkness of Mormon-dominated Utah. As a recent transplant to Utah, I relished the explanations of LDS rituals that were described with not so subtle criticism--for me that rush of knowing what you're not supposed to know. But, the narrator, an old man who thinks he knows everything--and ultimately ruins everything--is a little over the top and more than a little self-indulgent