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Product Description: Novelist Shannon Burke earned stunning reviews for his debut book, Safelight, and now he returns with the same minimalist intensity in this arresting follow-up. Black Flies is the story of paramedic Ollie Cross and his first year on the job in mid-'90s New York. It is a ground's eye view of life on the streets: the shoot-outs, the bad cops, unhinged medics, the hopeless patients, the dark humor in bizarre circumstances, and one medic's struggle to balance his desire to help against his own growing callousness. It is the story of lives that hang in the balance, and of a single job with a misdiagnosed newborn that sends Cross and his partner into a life-changing struggle between good and evil. Customer Reviews: Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-27
This book is terrific
This book is a terrific read. I couldn't put it down. It's dark and comic and a coming of age story. But most of all it is masterly written book allowing the reader to venture into a forbidding world with compassion and insight. Rating:
Date: 2008-06-16
amazing
when I picked this book up for the first time I wasn't sure what to expect exactly, but I was taken by storm. I devoured this book in between calls on my ambulance and finished it in about 4 hours in total. it's got some stylistic similarities to Tim O'brien's the things they carried except that it holds together as a single more or less continuos story. at the same time the author has sort of a no holds barred concept which gives the story the same sort of gritty gut punching feeling as a Hubert Selby Jr Novel (Last exit to brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream)...almost all in all this book swept me away and didn't let me go until I was done and I spent the rest of the day leafing through it a reliving my favorite parts of the book because I wasnt quite ready to be done yet. highly recomended Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-10
My Interest Quickly Flagged
Because the theme and content of these episodes are essentially repetitious, there is no suspense but rather a sense of tedium even with descriptions of the most horrendous acts. The recurring characters themselves are also flat and one dimensional. I believe this book would have worked much better as nonfiction--"fictionalization" seems to have taken the punch out of it. Rating: 
Date: 2008-06-06
Intense, well-written novel
I purchased the novel after reading the NY Times review comparing it to Herr's Dispatches. From the very first page, I was hooked. I simply could not put the book down. Some parts were disturbing but so realistic and well-portrayed. If you're looking for a novel to take you out of your comfort zone, then this is it. Rating:
Date: 2008-05-30
Tough medical times in NYC
One of the hardest things about being in the health care profession is that, from the perspective of the caregiver, after a while patients' problems can begin to lose their edge. Patients themselves can begin to seem unimportant, unreal, compared to the caregiver's concerns. The protagonist of this book -- Ollie Cross, a NYC paramedic assigned to Harlem -- experiences this challenge in depth. The author makes Ollie's loss of compassion quite understandable by recounting in almost mind-numbing succession one horrifying experience after another. Not for the fainthearted, but if you are in health care, particularly if you work in a setting whereby the resources are inadequate and the patient population challenging, this cautionary tale is worth reading. | 
