Smonk

by Tom Franklin, Javier Lucini (Translator)

Smonk odia a las cabras y a los irlandeses. Tiene un Winchester y gasta un bastón de empuñadura de marfil con una espada oculta. Lleva cuatro o cinco revólveres repartidos por la ropa, munición de sobra, cartuchos de dinamita y un cuchillo en una bota. Luce varias cicatrices de bala en el hombro derecho, una en cada antebrazo y otra en el pie izquierdo, perdigonazos por toda la espalda y una cuchillada en la tripa. Tiene gota, bocio, gonorrea, sífilis, azúcar en la sangre, neuralgia y fiebres intermitentes. También malaria, tuberculosis, un ojo de cristal y una infinita sed de venganza.

Evavangeline odia a los caballos. Es una puta, huérfana y fugitiva, de quince años aficionada al gatillo y al aguardiente. Disfrazada de hombre, huye de una patrulla de fanáticos religiosos a través de un país devastado por la rabia, la sequía y la guerra.

Sus destinos coincidirán en Old Texas, un pueblucho perdido y dejado de la mano de Dios en el sudoeste de Alabama, poblado de viudas y niños muertos, que oculta un horrible secreto.

Genres: Fiction, Westerns, Historical Fiction, Southern Gothic, Southern, Novels, Crime

278 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Tom Franklin was born and raised in Dickinson, Alabama. He held various jobs as a struggling writer living in South Alabama, including working as a heavy-equipment operator in a grit factory, a construction inspector in a chemical plant and a clerk in a hospital morgue. In 1997 he received his MFA from the University of Arkansas. His first book, Poachers was named as a Best First Book of Fiction by Esquire and Franklin received a 1999 Edgar Award for the title story. Franklin has published two novels: Hell at the Breech, published in 2003 and Smonk published in 2006. The recipient of the 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, Franklin now teaches in the University of Mississippi's MFA program and lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, and their children.

Reviews

[PirateSteve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hick Lit., Grit Lit., Call it what you please
Southern Gothic, Rebel Sleaze
Won't set yer mind at ease.

So pay Hell Mary, congress again
Confess to us yer sin

I say to ye, a damn goodt story
Smonk... in all his glory

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

smonk!

excuse me, smonk!!!

smonk smonk smonk smonk smonk

now isn't that fun to say??

one more time: smonk

i would rather just keep saying "smonk" than write this book report, even though i thoroughly enjoyed the book. it is just too tempting to smonk.

now i understand...

okay, but for serious, because goodreads is a place for the serious reviews of books, not just a place for made-up words that shout at you float after float after float.

this is my second tom franklin, and while i don't think it was as good as crooked letter, crooked letter, it was a great read.

this book is a carnival of gore and unfortunate physical malformations and sex and cults and a parade of offensive behavior. this is not a book club book for ladies whose last book was the help. this is not even maybe a book for people who liked crooked letter. this is like mccarthy meets burroughs meets brautigan meets donoso all hopped up on mescaline.

animals will die. people will die. the streets will be flooded in blood and death will occur in the most improbable ways. underage prostitutes will murder their johns and seduce little boys all for a dollar.

birds will eat human eyeballs outta living men.

there will be cross-dressing and racism and sodomy and a glass eyeball will be repeatedly swallowed and ...recovered. someone stabbed in the stomach will leak bloody rice from his wound. dogs will be burned.

but it is all presented comedically. or i read it that way. it is an absurdist book which eventually ends on a giggle, if you can giggle around all the vomit sure to be filling your mouth.

(maybe i should have stopped at smonk.)

i could probably write a better review of this, but right now i am too busy giggling over smonk.

perhaps i will return to this someday. call it a float.

come to my blog!

[Melki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who, or what, the hell is Smonk?

Mister E.O. Smonk ain't no normal fellow. He's of the devil says one legend.

Some citizens claim he's of the devil but I say there's no of about it, he is the devil says another.

And the rumors . . . my goodness. He was born with teeth. He killed his mother. He bit the midwife, and gave her "ray bees."

Only one thing is certain . . .

. . . if you seek him, check Hell first.

When Eugene Oregon Smonk unleashes his own brand of HELL on Old Texas, Alabama, its residents will never be the same.

Still making their noise, the widows in silhouette looked up from the murdered while behind them the hotel roof collapsed, fire and smoke bursting out the top windows and a moment later those on the ground floor, the air fogged with smoke and the yowls so baleful and plaintive it seemed Hell had breeched its levee and poured forth its river of death.

Who will stop this monster? A posse of Christian Deputies? A teenage vigilante whore? A horny young whippersnapper? Whoever does the deed, rest assured it will be a showdown like nothing you've ever seen before.

This book . . . oy! This book . . .

It was unbelievably nasty, vile, disgusting, repulsive, smelly, and messy. And I couldn't put it down! Highly, HIGHLY recommended, but only to those of stout heart, strong stomach, prurient inclinations, and a curious nature.


*Adding this line here because it made me snort out loud, and I never want to forget it:

. . . not half an hour earlier, Smonk had dispatched four of an Irishman's goats in their pen because the only thing he abhorred more than an Irish was an Irish goat.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here are a few words you could use to describe Smonk

Depraved disgusting debased debauched degraded scabrous malevolent syphilitic grotesque graphic gross gory gouty goitered violent horrible cruel mean very violent have I already said that shameless vicious vile putrid

And there are no doubt others along those lines. Now, fans of this book add a very important other word : hilarious.

But alas, mes amis, I myself cannot add that word. Every page I read of Smonk I was unlaughing fit to unburst. My sides were unsplit, my visage stoney, of stone.

So if you do not find a mashup of Evil Dead and Cormac McCarthy featuring – to take but one memorable example – a mole growing on a guy’s fizzog which is so long that when it’s detached from him after he’s been killed by a 15 year old prostitute it’s mistaken for a severed penis – especially lol-inducing to the characters - this book is probably not for you as it wasn’t for me.

In this book a severed penis is something that a person might carry around in their pocket, like, for luck or something.

If I was 17 it might be another story. I would probably be telling you how much Smonk rocks.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: It's 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by a scabrous and malevolent character called E. O. Smonk. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. He abhors horses, goats and the Irish. Every Saturday night for a year he's been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over and under rifle. At last the desperate citizens of the town, themselves harboring a terrible secret, put Smonk on trial, with disastrous and shocking results. Thus begins the highly anticipated new novel from Tom Franklin, acclaimed author of Hell at the Breech and Poachers.

Smonk is also the story of Evavangeline, a fifteen-year-old prostitute quick to pull a trigger or cork. A case of mistaken identity plunges her into the wild sugarcane country between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, land suffering from the worst drought in a hundred years and plagued by rabies. Pursued by a posse of unlikely vigilantes, Evavangeline boats upriver and then wends through the dust and ruined crops, forced along the way to confront her own clouded past. She eventually stumbles upon Old Texas, where she is fated to E. O. Smonk and the townspeople in a way she could never imagine.

In turns hilarious, violent, bawdy and terrifying, Smonk creates its own category: It's a southern, not a western, peopled with corrupt judges and assassins, a cuckolded blacksmith, Christian deputies, widows, War veterans, whores, witches, madmen and zombies. By the time the smoke has cleared, the mystery of Smonk will be revealed, the survivors changed forever.

My Review: Oh! Oh, I see...THIS is what y'all were on about when y'all were carryin' on over Franklin's writing. It surely to hell couldn't've been that crooked mess. That was painful.

Eugene Oregon Smonk is as horrible a character as Ignatius Reilly. He's as gross, as grotesque, as cruel, and as massively hilariously vile. Smonk suffers from gout, so he's already ten yards ahead of everybody else in the book in my good graces. He's got terminal consumption, too. (I don't have that.) He's bowlegged, he hates horses, he detests people. He's murdered and raped and generally been as much like Attila as a modern man can be.

Evavangeline is fifteen, a whore, and mean as a butt-fucked polecat. She doesn't know what “thank you” means, she's got no idea what impulse control is, and she expresses her displeasure with johns who don't pay up (I refuse to reach for the cheap joke inherent in “stiff her”) in most-often fatal ways.

And these, laddies and gentlewomen, are our heroes.

Yeup. This book, it's as much fun to read as a William S. Burroughs novel edited by Roger Corman. It's got energy. It's got no time for sacred, for nice, for sweet. It's got no place for normal, for kindly, for restrained. (Unless you mean “tied up for sex.”) It is, in short, a book for the boisterous and the bawdy, not the timorous and the tidy.

I totally get the Franklin thing now. That crookedy crapola? That's nothing much, it's no doubt what happened when some longfaced Puritan somewhere started biting Franklin behind the ear after this book came out. He should slap her into next Sunday and go back to Smonking. This genre-busting carnival of louche and salacious and violent living is far far far more interesting and better written.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a testament to pressing matters that I finished this two days ago and truly didn't find the space to put it to wraps. Smonk worried me. Several times I feared I would injure myself laughing. I was also worried that members of an unnamed disease cult would butcher me. Tom Franklin has a sense of pitch which astonishes me. No doubt his craven Christian is named Portis for obvious reasons. I liked that touch.

Enclosed in the back of the novel was a receipt. I treasure such discoveries. This instance provided a delightful portal. The receipt was from a bookstore in Chicago where I bought this novel nearly five years ago to the day (from today). We were in town to see our friends and that evening we were going to see Manu Chao. The humidity was hellish. I spotted this store, begged apologies and ran within. It is is strange that it took me five years to meet Mr. E.O. Smonk. I am glad that I did.

[Snotchocheez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anyone interested in Southern US contemporary fiction who hasn't yet made acquaintance with Tom Franklin needs to do so. If you prefer a slice of the old South, 2003's Hell at the Breach , while super violent, is just a terrific (and terrifying) fictional account of a real skirmish in South Alabama. If the old stuff doesn't float your boat, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter : part thriller, part examination of race relations in today's Mississippi. If you're a Cormac McCarthy fan (an author that Franklin cites as an influence on his Goodreads profile page), you may want to give Smonk a try. Anyone that knows me at all on here is probably done hearing my rants on McCarthy's annoying penchant for ditching quotation marks. Not only does Frankin try with Smonk to emulate McCarthy, it's almost like he's trying to purposely out-McCarthy McCarthy here, right up to ditching the quotes and adding as much violent imagery and degredation as possible. The violence is so gruesome here it's almost comedy (and is hilarious, if your tolerance for said base behavior is high.) What I cannot understand: why Franklin felt compelled to completely copy McCarthy's style. He'd already established his own distinctive style before 2006's Smonk, why make an overt attempt to emulate McCarthy?
-
Smonk's complete title Smonk, or, Widow Town: being the scabrous adventures of EO Smonk & of the Whore Evavangelina in Clarke County, Alabama, early in the last century pretty much gives you the idea that this is not going to be your typical western. Nope, not by a long shot. From the git-go, you know this Smonk guy is one bad (and disgusting) dude. We see him hauled into court in Old Texas, AL with a laundry list of offenses, from prostitution to murder.(not to mention he's begoitered and has a glass eye that pops out at inopportune moments).

We find out quickly why Old Texas becomes known as Widow Town (as you might intuit, Smonk pretty much mows down the male populace of the town.) and also find out the role of the Whore Evavangelina (it's not exactly for comic relief as that cumbersome name might indicate).

Despite this being an overt McCarthy smackdown of sorts, and disgustingly violent, I still liked this, just nowhere near as much as Hell at the Breach. There are threshholds of violence one can endure when that violence becomes so pervasive it turns into parody. I'd really only recommend Smonk for die-hard Franklin fans (with iron constitutions); otherwise, avoid this and read anything else of his. But make sure you do read something of his. You won't regret it.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eugene Oregon Smonk is 5'3", has one eye, is syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, and is so wide that he has to walk through doorways sideways. He's also a murderous, adulterous, incestuous, hateful SOB. And 100% fantastic. Smonk is one of the most original characters I've ever read.

The easily squeamish should stay away, as Franklin never lets up with the uber-nastiness. But if you can swallow the gore-fest, you'll be rewarded by some of the finest writing in the genre, with action that burns and a plot that makes the pages fly. I've read four of Franklin's books, and so far this one is my favorite. Ridiculously original and entertaining.

[The Shayne-Train · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was amazingly bloody and raw, like an open, untreated wound.

The characters, even the ones you absolutely hated, had such depth to them. Some find redemption, some get a well-deserved death, some of them just get the "ray bees," but all of them leave an impression.

To me, this book brought with it almost a feeling of anxiety. You know that hollow ache you get in your stomach when you've intentionally procrastinated doing something urgent and important? I had that feeling the entire time I was reading this, but in a GOOD way. Somehow.

[Ɗẳɳ 2.☊ · Rating 5 out of 5]

It'll be quite the challenge to find a nit to pick with this one. Let's see if I'm up to it. RTC?

[John Bruni · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very transgressive western novel. I love westerns. I love transgressive fiction. Imagine my joy upon reading the adventures of EO Smonk! It's bawdy. It's dirty. It's vile. SO vile! None of the characters are likable, but they are all interesting in dark and ugly ways. But no matter how grotesquely the book begins, you will have no clue as to the depravity waiting for you in the last, say, two to three chapters. It borders on pure horror, and it is absolutely sickening. I loved it!

[Wayne Barrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun and adventurous read... in a grotesque kind of way. There were moments I found myself laughing out loud. Smonk was a tough old boy, but I think Evangeline might have been a little tougher.

[a_reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Old Texas, Alabama
1911

Prepare yourself...

Smonk started out with a bang (literally) and the action never let up once. This is Tom Franklin's most vile and horrid book to date. Although Smonk himself is appalling and amusing at the same time, I found much more delight in other's stories about him - his history and superstitions. But my favorite character was Walton, the leader of the Christian Deputies, who as a northerner felt a personal mission to bring morality back to the South. Franklin created such harsh imagery that I couldn't help imaging the landscape in black and burnt oranges/reds - the scorched earth and dead dogs. The last portion of this book somewhat lost my interest as it morphed into a horror story of sorts with the dead children in the church and all the ray bees (rabies) being transmitted. Otherwise a solid book and not be missed by fans of gritty Southern literature.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Franklin pulls out the stops for his second novel. This is an over the top comic nightmare combining Peckinpah and Leone movies (leaning more toward the comic absurdity of Leone with the brutality of bloody Sam intact), Old Testament (esp. Sodom & Gomorrah), David Lynch, horror movies, southern gothic, and Cormac McCarthy with the volume turned up to eleven. Witches, madmen, rabies, machine guns, relentless gore and violence, scatological references, zombies, insane religious cults, crazed animals, and a group of Christian vigilantes in a series of events that twist and congeal into a clever plot that would unpalatably grim if it wasn’t so relentlessly hilarious. Whatever planet you are beaming this stuff from Mr. Franklin, keep it up.

[n0s4a2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una historia que no da tregua, con mucha acción, violencia, todo ello en un entorno del salvaje oeste, con unos personajes peculiares, sucios y barriobajeros, que van desentrañando poco a poco lo que tienen en común.

Me ha encantado, para ser la primera novela que leo de Dirty Works y de Tom Franklin, no será la última.

[Belle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do not read this book. Don't do it.

It is rude and crude and not civil.

Unless, you can imagine a dinner party with this author, Tom Franklin, Donald Ray Pollock and Shirley Jackson. All at the same table.

If you think you could live that night out, you can probably read this book.

Bye - I have to go to church now.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure how to classify this one...Western, although it doesn't take place in the West; horror; Southern gothic?? This was one weird book about a man named Smonk who terrorizes a small town in Alabama called Old Texas. Smonk has only one eye, a goiter, syphilis, and consumption, yet he is able to kill all the men in the small southern town. The book is also about Evavangelina, a young girl who is often mistaken for a boy who also makes her living as a hooker. The book is filled with vileness including myriad killings of men, women, children, and animals, and countless sex acts including child abuse and incest. And then the real weirdness kicks in. What is really happening in the small Alabama town and how does it relate to Smonk and Evavangelina?

I was very mixed on this one with its weird storyline. The prose also left me somewhat perplexed at times with run-on thoughts and phrases. I sometimes had to reread paragraphs for a better understanding. I think the novel was supposed to be humorous but I really didn't find it so. Overall, I would recommend reading with caution!

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazing book! I was expecting 'grit lit' and the title character was a Southern Gothic version of The Judge in Blood Meridian. This story was incredibly funny and bizarre .... all taboos were trampled, especially no limits at all with the widows in Old Texas, Alabama. The whole ray bees thing as a religious cult had me nodding my head....yeah they are surely the chosen ones!. Yay ray bees!!

[WJEP · Rating 2 out of 5]

Impressive how Franklin can keep making cooter/pecker/fart jokes for 250 pages. Franklin must have had a lot of fun writing this -- more fun than I had reading it. I have mixed feelings about this book: On the one hand, it is immoderate and indecent; on the other hand, sometimes you're in the mood for "a quick suck and a spot of licker."

The title character is a cross between Rooster Cogburn and Mongo. The other main character is a rabid tomboy whore named Evavangeline. The stories converge at the end witlessly.

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

This opens with a bang, the first four chapters are amongst the most savage and grotesque as I have read in fiction. It’s 1911 in Alabama and E.O. Smonk and Evavangeline, both thoroughly despicable characters, are running amok on separate paths of destruction, sharing some bit characters in their storylines, but otherwise remaining oblivious of each other’s existence as they move toward the day of reckoning. Franklin’s rural Alabama is populated by such depravity that their actions are placed in context, as evil as they may be, they are just striving for survival in a brutal world.
Alone as a western blood-bath this would have limited appeal, but with the imagery created by his terse character descriptions and a deft application of black humour make it stand-out as an outstanding work in the southern gothic genre. Perhaps inevitably after such an explosive start, the last quarter doesn’t deliver to the same degree; some subplots are left unresolved and the final chapters teeter on the wrong side of the plausibility line. But it remains a quite memorable and utterly compelling read.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here we have a Tom Franklin novel masquerading as a Cormac McCarthy novel, quotation mark-less and spare. It features E.O. Smonk, a one-eyed, goitered, syphilitic, tuberculous killing machine. Also Evavangeline, a fifteen year old, fiery-locked whore prone to biting.

But what begins as a McCarthy rip-off grows into so much more, a completely unexpected genre mashup with a rich mythology and twists and turns to boot. I can't even describe what happens without giving it away, but if you read this book, you're in for a crazy ride.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

If Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy were to have included all manners of perversity and unnatural acts in their western fiction, in astounding and copious amounts, the result would be something akin to this book, though this story takes place in the South. While I enjoyed it very much, there are only a few individuals I would suggest this book to. Violent, crazy, immoral, and debauched. Just about as depraved as any book I have ever read, and that's saying something. Methinks even a director like Tarantino might hesitate to take this story up. Don't say I didn't warn you.

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was scared about this one. I didn't think I could handle all the gore. Lucky for me my sense of humor overcame my gag reflex.

[Yuri Zbitnoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's see...

A mean, violent, drunken, syphilitic, gout-ridden, goitered, one-eyed protagonist. A murderous prostitute. A religious zealot who drinks his own piss when he has lustful thoughts. Leeches on testicles. Burning dogs and possums. Rats. Rabies. Dysentery. Guns. Witches. Revenge. Dark family secrets. Buckets of blood.

Yup. This book rules.

[Guillermo · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Para hacerlo callar, Evavangeline arremetió con la cabeza, le arrancó un trozo de cuello de un bocado y lo escupió sobre las sábanas como si fuese una ostra. El se quedó mirándola embobado y, al momento, se puso a gritar. Ella logró liberar por fin la
pistola, lo agarró de la papada, le metió un tiro en el ojo derecho, luego le estabilizó la cabeza y le metió otro en el izquierdo, y luego otro más por la nariz, mientras sus labios seguían formando palabras. Acto seguido, girándole la barbilla hacia ambos lados en busca de ángulo, le descerrajó una bala en cada oído de tal forma que apenas le quedó nada por encima de la mandíbula inferior, la mitad superior del cráneo vencida hacia atrás como un capuchón de pelo. Con la cara llena de salpicaduras sanguinolentas, se dio cuenta de que la dentadura inferior permanecía intacta. Retiró la sangre, le extirpó una muela de oro con el cuchillo y, al soltar el cadáver, la cabeza se desangró sobre el catre como una lata de pintura volcada. Retrocedió unos pasos y recargó. La pólvora le había quemado la membrana entre el pulgar y el índice. Volvió a poner en su sitio la aguja del gramófono que había derrapado y, entonces, por un breve instante en su vida, mientras el humo se enroscaba en el aire, escuchó las cuerdas de Haendel».

[John Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bawdy, bloody,strange,sinister and just plain fun to read! Just who or what is E. O. Smonk and what is up with the town of Old Texas, Alabama in 1911. Mr. Smonk has decided to terrorize this town, but as the story unfolds, you'll realize that this town isn't exactly a normal town. Geographically, an Eastern or a Southern, stylistically a Western, this tongue in cheek horror tale has many twists and turns and I (being a bit twisted) enjoyed every one.

[Pepa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nada que ver con Letra torcida, cuidado. Esta novela es una locura hiperviolenta sin tapujos pero con mucho sentido del humor bajo el body count. En su aparente despiporre acoge a unos personajes de los que no puedes dejar de leer y una telaraña de historias de las que estás deseando llegar al centro.
Consecuencias de la guerra civil, locura religiosa, endogamia, perros rabiosos y kilos de balas. Aunque parezca un oxímoron, es deliciosa.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting story with a lot of surprises, as well as characters that were, to say the least, unique, but man, just too, too, too graphic, gross, gory, you name it. Nauseating descriptions of rotting eye sockets and the like made this a difficult book for me to even get through. I am not sure I even liked it, but I admired the skill of it, so I split the difference and went three stars.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

The horror. The horror. Clever and dark images abound in this book full of worse-than-circus freaks. Had trouble wanting to pick it up and read it, not for poor writing, but I just had no interest in the cartoon like devils within the pages.

[Joshua Jorgensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Smonk was a wild read. It was unpredictable, funny, dark, and a southern gothic gem. It felt like a strange blend of Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Allan Poe. Bizarre. But, again. I enjoyed the read.