Blackwood by Michael Farris Smith

A strange family of drifters and a misunderstood native son converge on a small Mississippi town in the 1970s and disrupt the barely existing rhythm of life there.

To call Red Bluff a blighted town is an understatement. What passes for the local economy is a clutch of small stores, a pharmacy and bar. Even the surrounding country is in a static state, with kudzu vines choking the hills surrounding the town.

A presumed husband and wife and their teenage son arrive in town and immediately put off the locals. The sheriff offers them help, but the father refuses. The family remains in the area just outside of town; the father is a vague presence, the mother and son regular fixtures as they come into town to collect scrap and throw away food. Soon, it is just the son who makes his rounds of the garbage cans.

Another stranger sets up shop in one of the deserted storefronts, although Colburn, as he is known, is from Red Bluff, and in the first chapter, we find out why he and his mother left the area twenty years previously. His first few weeks there are largely uneventful, but certain townspeople recognize him, and this changes things – that, and his relationship to the bar owner.

There are stranger forces at work here, embodied in the endless cloak of kudzu that casts a pall over the nearby country, and takes over anything (houses, cars) deserted for any amount of time. It’s a matter of time before people begin to disappear.

Blackwood is an intense page turner, a slow burning read that reeks of hot weather and dread. There’s certainly a horror element here with the kudzu, but is it really the perpetrator? The book definitely has a strong rural noir vibe as well.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels

Cole Freeman is twenty seven and stuck – stuck in a rural West Virginia community, stuck in a low-paying nurse’s aide job, and stuck in a cycle of petty thievery.

Cole genuinely has a talent with handling the residents at his nursing home job. He maintains a good rapport with most of them, and can empathize with the befuddlements of the aged. Cole is also good at stealing his patients’ hidden money, their jewelry, and their prescription drugs, which he resells to supplement his salary. He also keeps up with his steady contacts, people within the community who are willing to sell him their own prescription medications, and others happy to buy.

Combining his roles as nursing home aide and drug dealer is a risky way of making a living, but far preferable to working for Heritage, a large coal company that provides employment but is destroying the community through lack of conservation. Those that live close to their strip mining operation feel the wrath of constant blasting, and the quality of the area’s drinking water suffers from the company’s lax practices.

To his credit, Cole truly cares about his grandparents, and is glad to help them out financially with what he makes. They, after all, raised him after his mother left town shortly after Cole was born. But his lifestyle is a far cry from the beliefs of his devout grandfather, a once fiery snake-handling Holiness preacher, who is quickly sinking into dementia.

Cole finds love of a sort, warily reacquaints himself with a close friend of high school days, and tries to reconcile with his mother, who reappears in town and stays there following his grandfather’s death.

The Evening Hour balances a lot in its 300 plus pages – the ravages of strip mining, the hopelessness of poverty and drug addiction, estranged family dynamics – and combines it all into a worthwhile page turner. The book’s characters are hard edged and pitiful, sometimes all at once. Cole is a mess, although a character that I found easy to root for, even though much of what he does is questionable. He is a caring soul, despite his flaws, but he is as mired in the spiral of his life as anyone else.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

The Devil All The Time by Donald Ray Pollock

Arvin Russell is born to a doomed life.

His father Willard, mind twisted by the horrors of the Pacific during World War II, wants nothing more than steadiness. He thinks he finds it with Charlotte, the pretty waitress he meets in the town of Meade in hilly southeastern Ohio. They marry, have one child, and struggle to piece together a home, a farmhouse rented from a lawyer in town.

Their plan is to eventually buy the property, but Charlotte gets cancer, and everything is put on hold. Willard, devastated by his wife’s illness, forces Arvin to pray with him at a fallen log deep in the woods behind their house. As Charlotte’s condition worsens, Willard’s log pilgrimages become more gruesome.

Intertwined with Arvin’s story is that of Lee Bodecker, the sheriff who’s not completely clean in his business dealings. Bodecker has plenty to keep him busy, but his biggest worry is his sister Sandy, who married Carl Henderson, a self-styled photographer. Bodecker dislikes Carl intensely, and is deeply suspicious of the “vacations” the two take. If only he knew the truth.

Add to the mix Roy and Theodore, two itinerate men of faith whose methods of bringing their audiences closer to God are unconventional. Roy is a fiery orator who handles preaching and arachnid handling in equal aplomb. Theodore, legs crippled by an act of faith gone bad, accompanies Roy’s preaching frenzies with amazing guitar work.

These story lines and others twist together to create the bumpy ride that is The Devil All The Time. The book is highly readable – probably one of the better Rural Noir novels I’ve read in a while. The book is also one of violence, but if you’re familiar with Rural Noir literature, it’s to be expected. All of the characters are deeply flawed, and several are pretty despicable. Arvin shines through as one with a moral compass, but he is not averse to using his fists or pistol to settle a score.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

Like Lions by Brian Panowich

McFalls County sheriff Clayton Burroughs is a broken man in many ways.  He wrestles with the aches of past injuries, drinks his way through a failing marriage and fatherhood to an infant son, and struggles to keep his distance from his family’s legacy as the county’s drug kingpins.

Although his father died years ago and his brother Halford was a recent casualty (by Clayton’s hand), the Burroughs organization is still vital, but crumbling without direction.  There are family associates that recognize Clayton’s hardheaded talents and want him back in the fold.

Clayton is a hard sell, until a shoot up in a local bar stirs up a bigger nest of trouble, as forces from outside the county, in the form of the volatile Viner family, want in on the sway the Burroughs family once had, and they don’t play easy.

After some rough justice that goes too far, Clayton and his family are now in danger, and he doubts what integrity he has left.  And his marriage with Kate, damaged as it is, may be his last strength.

This book is the sequel to Bull Mountain, one of the hardest hitting debuts of rural noir I have read.  Like its predecessor, Like Lions starts hard and finishes harder, a potboiler that begs for continual page turning.  There’s some serious violence, and an incident in one chapter that I had to reread several times to have it sink in.  By the end, it’s understood that nobody’s hands come clean.

I started Like Lions with high hopes, and while it didn’t impress me as much as the first book (do sophomore efforts ever?), the book caught on quickly enough.  I burned through it in a few days, and the first and last chapters, both prequel to the rest of the book, worked nicely together into a surprise ending.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

 

Sugar Run by Mesha Maren

Jodi McCarty, serving life for murdering her girlfriend Paula, has spent all of her adulthood in jail.  Now thirty-five, she gets an early release, and freedom is a nebulous concept to her.  Her only motivations are unfinished business in Georgia and a planned move back to her grandmother’s farm in West Virginia.

It’s in Georgia that Jodi first encounters Miranda, a young mother of three boys who is living in a motel room.  Miranda is a charmer whose facade hides a troubled marriage and a pill addiction.  Jodi is drawn to Miranda, and soon plans to drive Miranda and her kids up to West Virginia, along with Ricky, Paula’s abused younger brother who is now grown, but still a man-child living under his father’s thumb.

The farm remains there, overgrown and remote and no longer hers, and there’s a fracking operation going on that’s uncomfortably close by.  Still, Jodi is dead set on living there.

Life on the farm is idyllic at first but primitive – they have no electricity, running water is a hand pump in the kitchen, and the facilities are an outhouse.  The cabin there is in the process of caving in.  It’s not a utopian paradise, but Jodi envisions the farm as the best refuge for all involved.

The outside world has a way of working in its troubles.  Jodi’s two younger brothers want certain favors from her that could compromise her parole, the outside owner who bought her land at auction years ago is becoming more persistent, and Jodi has to establish a shaky alliance with a rich if eccentric woman in town in an effort to buy back the property.

Sugar Run is a gripping novel told in two overlapping time frames, the earlier working up gradually to Jodi’s killing of Paula.  The book observes some pretty hard people who are molded by poverty and drug abuse.  Jodi herself is a mess of confusion – someone without any kind of foundation trying to make a better situation for herself and others, often without thinking how the others might feel about her intentions.

With recommendations from the likes of Lauren Groff, Daniel Woodrell, and others, it appears that the author is off to a good start.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

Sweetgirl by Travis Mulhauser

Sixteen-year-old Percy James is on a wild goose chase to find her methed-out mother Carletta during a northern Michigan blizzard.  With a stuck vehicle, she trudges to her mom’s dealer’s house, where she sees her mother’s car, but no Carletta, the dealer and his girlfriend passed out in the living room, and a sick and malnourished baby left in an upstairs room with the window wide open.

Percy’s plan is to get the baby to safety, but her action unleashes the fury of Shelton the dealer when he comes to and notices the baby missing.  Shelton has contacts – guys tied to his influential uncle who know the lay of the land and aren’t afraid to snowmobile it, gun or improvised weapon in hand.

These men haven’t dealt with Portis Dale, yet.  He’s a crusty recluse who once dated Percy’s mother and knows the woods better than any of Shelton’s druggy minions.  And he is Percy’s last chance, in a testy storm that shows little mercy.

The storyline alternates between Percy’s 1st person and Shelton’s 3rd person.  While it is primarily Percy’s tale and you certainly can feel her frustrations with the local drug culture and the hopelessness of small town life, it’s interesting to watch Shelton develop beyond a one-note caricature of a drug dealer.  While he is far from noble, the man has at least a shred of conscience, in evidence with his wanting to do something right – whether it’s figuring out the best interest of the baby or accepting responsibility for his own mistakes.

Sweetgirl draws a comparison to DanieI Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone.  I am also reminded of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River.  All three have tough-talking young heroines on quests of self preservation and redemption.  But Mulhauser has created his own story and cast of voices, and Sweetgirl holds its own; the book will grab your attention to the very last page.  Read the previous two novels if you are so inclined (and they are very good) but don’t miss this one.

I’d say the world of grit lit  is off to a fine start for 2016.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

 

 

Bull Mountain by Brian Panowich

Clayton Burroughs is the black sheep of the family, but not the way you’d think.

He’s the sheriff of a county in northern Georgia, trying to walk the straight and narrow. His father and brothers remain in their mountain fastness, which has been inhabited by the Burroughs brood for generations.  The family finances have come largely through illegal means – moonshine in the earlier years, marijuana when it was feasible, and now meth.  It’s a business that works its hidden ways quite well, thanks to the isolation and the Burroughs ruthlessness.  They and their associates are not worth trifling with, ever.

Clayton establishes a better name for himself than his family background would indicate. being the upstanding lawman and married man that he is, yet he only keeps this up by turning a blind eye to his family’s unlawful enterprises.  This arrangement works for both parties, until the interest of one FBI agent stirs the hornet’s nest, and a shaky loyalty between brothers is forever changed.

Bull Mountain is a sprawling roar of a book that begs for a one-stop reading session.  All the elements of classic rural noir are here – the drug trade, internecine secrets and quarrels, lots of double-crossings, and a succession of chapters that will jerk the reader around like a creaky Scrambler ride at an amusement park.  It is not a book for the squeamish, so don’t expect a cosy.

As temptations arise, refrain from reading the last chapter before it’s time – highly worth the wild ride.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

Once upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Margo Crane is a sure shot with a rifle and a teenager of few words who lives her own internal life on a river in rural Michigan.  After her mother leaves the family and her father dies in a tragic accident,  Margo leaves home on a boat inherited from her grandfather.  Intent on finding her mother, she goes away burdened with revenge against certain of her relatives that live across the river – an uncle she trusted who raped her, and the cousin who shot her father in a rage.

Margo meets and lives with a number of men while on the river who vary from life teachers to lechers, and some are abusive.  She eventually makes friends with two elderly gentlemen, one of them on his last gasp (almost literally).  With these two unlikely friendships, Margo learns to navigate the troubles of her own young life and come to peace with its rough currents.

Margo is shy almost to a fault, but I wouldn’t call her antisocial.  She is a loner, but still seeks out companionship throughout the book, although she does make some seriously bad choices.  But among the cast of losers, cads, heroes and ordinary Joes she finds herself with, Margo manages to learn something from nearly everyone she encounters.  I liked her character in a big way; Margo reminded me greatly of Ree Dolly in Winter’s Bone or Mary Call Luther in Where The Lilies Bloom – two other teenage heroines who make their share of mistakes but still exhibit steely fortitudes.  Once Upon A River was hard to put down; the book possesses its own steady rhythm and quick readability, although it does have some violent episodes.  The river will draw you in.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell

Ree Dolly is forced to grow up too soon for her sixteen years when her father puts their house up as collateral for his bail and then skips town.  It might be easier on Ree if she were the only one involved, but she’s trying to raise two younger brothers largely by herself and caregiving a mind-wandering mother.  Her extended family scatters itself largely in their rural county, but everyone she speaks to has their own interests (more than occasionally outside the law) and Ree’s daddy has trod on plenty of toes.  Asking her relatives about the whereabouts of her father proves to be a dangerous proposition for Ree.

Harsh, stark, unyielding, hardscrabble – these are only a few of the words that can describe the world portrayed in Winter’s Bone.  Its characters are the type that have forever been on the frayed edge of the American Dream; they inhabit the rough landscape of the Missouri Ozarks and are as hard as that rocky land, living on a local economy that barely exists and family meth labs.  Ree is herself a product of this unforgiving environment.  Despite the lack of opportunity and her predicament in the book, Ree never gives up a belief in a future for herself and her family, away from the thankless existence of early pregnancy, drug abuse, and violence.

This book is my second encounter with Daniel Woodrell; I first met his mix of humor and country noir in Tomato Red.  He’s written several other books, and if this one and Tomato Red are any indication, I’m sure the rest of his oeuvre is worth a read.  Be prepared – Woodrell’s prose is wonderful, but the ride through his backwoods America can be a harrowing one.

(William Hicks, Information Services)

Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell

     I had never heard of Daniel Woodrell before one of my recent weekly sweeps through Publisher’s Weekly.  I’ve read a fair amount of literature about Appalachia (not nearly enough, but is it ever enough?) but not about the Ozark region, which is Woodrell’s main focus.  He’s from that area originally, and his writing emphasis is on folks who live poor and hard, are often violent, and usually reside in a setting outside "nice" America.  Such is the situation with Tomato Red, a book I picked out for the title, and by the finish of the flyleaf, was sucked in to Woodrell’s universe.

    Our main character is Sammy Barlach, recently out of prison and on the road to nowhere.  His road drops him off at West Table, Missouri, a small town of haves and have nots.  A dare to burglarize a local mansion acquaints him with Jamalee and Jason Merredew, siblings who will do anything to get out of a squalor-filled future in West Table, preferably away from their mother, who lives next to them and turns tricks for a vocation.  What they will do to accomplish this winds up involving Sammy in ways he never knew. 

     I enjoyed the book, although it is not for the squeamish.  It’s a page turner and fairly short.  Woodrell has a unique manner of phrasing and a highly twisted sense of humor.  What could have been a completely gritty and tragic story (and it is in a lot of places) made me laugh out loud at several points, as Sammy and the others try to make sense out of a series of quandaries, including taking on shady cops and the town country club crowd. 

     Woodrell has a new one coming out soon (Winter’s Bone) and I am really curious to see what he does with it.

(William Hicks, Information Services)