The Park in Popular Fiction
A cave in Inwood Park is where Pete Hamill's protagonist in the 2003 novel Forever receives the gift of immortality as long as he never leaves Manhattan. The name "Inwood" is repeatedly invoked in the novel as a site of destiny.
Fiction authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child used Inwood Hill Park as a mysterious locale for their 2009 bestseller Cemetery Dance. The book also goes into some of the history of the park, but plays a bit of artistic license in adding a small dark enclave within the area as a plot device. Previously, mystery writer S. S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright) set the plot of his novel The Dragon Murder Case (1934) in a fictional estate located in the middle of Inwood Hill Park.
In the 1995 pastiche, Sherlock Holmes and the Houdini Birthright by Val Andrews, Holmes and Dr. Watson visit with Bess Houdini, widow of the legendary magician Harry Houdini, at 67 Payson Ave. (the home she lived in after her husband's death) located next to Inwood Hill Park.
The 2001 film The Caveman's Valentine features a former pianist and paranoid schizophrenic named Romulus Ledbetter (Samuel L. Jackson), who lives in a cave in Inwood Park. Ledbetter discovers the frozen body of a young man left in a tree outside his cave and attempts to find out who murdered the youth.
Edward Conlon's novel Red on Red (2011) begins in Inwood Hill Park ("the stalagmite tip of Manhattan") where a woman is found hanging from a tree.
Read more about this topic: Inwood Hill Park
Famous quotes containing the words park, popular and/or fiction:
“Borrow a child and get on welfare.
Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child,
or go to the public park with the child, and take the child
to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and
be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don’t talk
back ...”
—Susan Griffin (b. 1943)
“There is a continual exchange of ideas between all minds of a generation. Journalists, popular novelists, illustrators, and cartoonists adapt the truths discovered by the powerful intellects for the multitude. It is like a spiritual flood, like a gush that pours into multiple cascades until it forms the great moving sheet of water that stands for the mentality of a period.”
—Auguste Rodin (1849–1917)
“If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.”
—William Gass (b. 1924)