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Twilight
Suspecting that something is amiss with their father’s burial, teenager Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie venture to his gravesite and make a horrific their father, a whiskey bootlegger, was not actually buried in the casket they bought for him. Worse, they learn that the undertaker, Fenton Breece, has been grotesquely manipulating the dead.
Armed with incriminating photographs, Tyler becomes obsessed with bringing the perverse undertaker to justice. But first he must outrun Granville Sutter, a local strongman and convicted murderer hired by Fenton to destroy the evidence. What follows is an adventure through the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled roads, rusted machinery, and eccentric squatters—old men, witches, and families among them—who both shield and imperil Tyler as he runs for safety.
With his poetic, haunting prose, William Gay rewrites the rules of the gothic fairytale while exploring the classic Southern themes of good and evil.
Armed with incriminating photographs, Tyler becomes obsessed with bringing the perverse undertaker to justice. But first he must outrun Granville Sutter, a local strongman and convicted murderer hired by Fenton to destroy the evidence. What follows is an adventure through the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled roads, rusted machinery, and eccentric squatters—old men, witches, and families among them—who both shield and imperil Tyler as he runs for safety.
With his poetic, haunting prose, William Gay rewrites the rules of the gothic fairytale while exploring the classic Southern themes of good and evil.
224 pages, Paperback
First published October 20, 2006
60 people are currently reading
6257 people want to read
About the author
William Gay
34 books537 followersWilliam Elbert Gay was the author of the novels Provinces of Night, The Long Home, and Twilight and the short story collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down. He was the winner of the 1999 William Peden Award and the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize and the recipient of a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship.
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October 27, 2017
So this lady asked William Gay if someone has been helping him write books.
"I said 'What do you mean by that?'
"And she said," 'Well, I knew your family a long time, and they're not that smart. I knew you when you were younger, and you're not that smart. I was wondering if you had somebody who took out the little words and put in the big words."' William Gay
When a person reads Twilight they should soon realize by the dialogue that William Gay was fluent in the Tennessee hill country vernacular. It's where he come from. In the narrative part of the book the reader will find something very different. It's a self taught, original voice that is oft times beautiful. He spoke with his own wisdom and understandings. It's a voice from his observations of nature, this land and it's people. A few characters are offensive, evil villains(fairly warned be thee) and his heroic characters are the courageous, goodhearted folks of Tennessee.
"I've always felt sort of like in between things. Like I fit in when I was working construction. I more or less could do my job. I didn't get fired. I got paid. I could do it. But it was always sort of like working under cover. Now when I'm meeting academic people and going to these things they have [conferences], basically it's still the same thing. I'm still under cover. Then, I was sort of a closet intellectual passing as a construction worker. Now, I'm a construction worker passing as an academic."
William Gay
When a man offers up that type of introspection, what sort of book is it he would write ... Twilight.
page 5/6/7
(1951) town folk
"When he noticed the quiltcovered cargo the wagon transported, he called, What you got there, Sandy?
The driver turned and spat and wiped his mouth and glanced back briefly but didn't stay the wagon. Dead folks, he said.
The wagon went on and vanished like some ghostwagon in the vaporous mist rising from the river."
"A fat man in overalls had approached the wagon ... Who all is it, Sandy?
The man pulled back the quilt covering with the faintest flourish ...
Sandy, that girl's half naked. Did you not have enough respect to cover her up?
The man they'd called Sandy spat.
... That's all the undertakin I aim to do. You want to handle em, then you cover em up."
"The dead exhibited in the strawstrewn wagonbed.
A Man or the bloody remnants of one.
A rawboned middleaged woman ...
A girl with hair the color and sheen of a bird's wing ...
A boy of fourteen or fifteen and another younger yet ..."
"... the fat man said suddenly. I never noticed that.
He pointed. A bloody mound of curly hair. A dog in there.
... Reckon why whoever it was killed the dog anyway?
I've thought about that some, Sandy said.
I believe it was just all there was left to kill."
page 22/23
narration
"Here was more. A rubberbanded stack of glossy black-and-white photographs. He slipped off the rubber band to rifle hastily through them.
He dropped them suddenly as if they'd seared his hand ...
He felt infected, poison freezing his nerve and brain..."
"He picked the photographs up carefully by their edges and replaced the rubber band and just sat holding them. What to do with them. These trading cards from beyond the river Styx, picture postcards mailed from Hell."
page 26
narration concerning Tyler(Kenneth) and his father, Old Moose(Mann) Tyler
"You won't amount to a goddamned thing.'
It was a summer of storms that year.
After the old man beat him he'd flee into these windtossed nights.
... he'd turn a face stained with blood and tears into the remote heavens and defy the lightning to take him ...
Then he quit crying altogether and took the beatings he couldn't escape with a kind of stoic and sullen outrage."
page 29
"By the time he died Tyler could have whipped him instead, but he never did it. He never hit him, never cursed him, just did his best to stay out of his way. honoring some biblical restraint of parental honor."
page 57/58
Granville Sutter speaks with Tyler
"We ought to be able to come to terms. You've got some idea about Fenton Breece and you're judgin me by him. Fat and soft and very likely some specie of queer. Let's get it straight right now that me and him ain't nothin alike.
What's he paying you?
I won't lie to you. He's payin me plenty. Because he's got a lot to lose and because he thinks I can stop up the holes where it's spillin out. And make no mistake about it, Tyler, I can. I'm the fix-it man, and you're the problem I been hired to fix."
"I'm goin to lay some folks out to cool if I have to, and I don't particularly care who. But what I want you to think about is the worst thing that can happen.
You know how folks kind of console one another? They say, well it could of been worse. Well, not this time. Believe it.
I am absolutely the worst thing that can happen to you."
page 87
narration on the Harrikin
"Census taking in the Harrikin was haphazard at best. There were folks born here with no birth certificate to show they were alive, folks buried with no papers to show they were dead. The Harrikin grew wild. Livestock wander into the Harrikin and are seen no more. Hunters have vanished as well, even compasses go fey and unreliable.
It was called the Harrikin long before the thirties when the tornado cut a swath through it. Folks called the tornado a harrikin, a hurricane, one fierce storm the same to them as another. This one came up through Alabama in 1933 and set down in the Harrikin as if it had had its ticket punched for there all along. Most of the folk who'd been dispossessed, and some who had't, moved on somewhere else. The Harrikin was becoming a symbol for ill luck."
page 98/99
Tyler caught sneakthievin food from a woman's shack in the woods
"Like visitors in some curious museum they stood side by side looking at a painting. That's the rapture, she said. When the dead awakes and them what's goin goes.
Where do you reckon you'll be on that great getting up morning?
Tyler thought about it. He studied the picture. As far away from this mess as I can get, he said.
I reckon I'll just wait till they get up another load."
page 115/116
Tyler meets Mr.Bookbinder
"Hidy, the boy said.
How do, the old man said. Warmin up some, ain't it?
Aren't you Mr.Bookbinder?
I'm Hollis Bookbinder. I ain't never been Mistered too much. Who might you be?
My name's Tyler.
I ain't had the rest of my mornin coffee. How about you?
I didn't have any at all.
Then I reckon you ready for some.
The coffee when the old man brought it was opaque and dark and so strong it almost required chewing."
page 119
Tyler with Bookbinder
"Tyler rose. Well, I guess I better get on. I got a long way to go.
I wouldn't worry too much about Sutter. Likely he's forgot about you ...
No. He's not forgot. There's something the matter with him. When he comes here, just tell him where I went. I didn't mean to mix you up in this.
I ain't tellin him jackshit. I reckon I can set on my own front porch and drink a cup of coffee with whoever I want to. But if that stuff about Sutter is so, you need to be anywhere else besides the Harrikin."
page 127/129
Tyler and the Harrikin Witch
"You got a potion that'll keep a man from killing you?
Her eyes remarked the gun. Looks to me like you totin around a potion'd do that.
I don't want to kill anybody. I just want to keep from getting killed.
How come this feller wantin to kill you?
An undertaker hired him to, I reckon.
I'm a old woman, but I never knowed undertakin to be so slow they had to kill folks for business.
There's somethin about you. Some folks say more than they know. You say considerable less. There's somethin about you, and I don't know of it's a great good or a great evil."
page 137
Granville Sutter's thoughts
"After a while he slept or thought he slept. He dreamed or dreamed he did. Anymore the line between dreams and reality was ambiguous at best. For years he'd felt madness sniffing his tracks like an unwanted dog he couldn't stay shut of."
page 204
" ... and I learnt somethin right then and there. I was learnin it late, but I reckon that's better than never. There's folks you just don't need. You're better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain't in it."
"I said 'What do you mean by that?'
"And she said," 'Well, I knew your family a long time, and they're not that smart. I knew you when you were younger, and you're not that smart. I was wondering if you had somebody who took out the little words and put in the big words."' William Gay
When a person reads Twilight they should soon realize by the dialogue that William Gay was fluent in the Tennessee hill country vernacular. It's where he come from. In the narrative part of the book the reader will find something very different. It's a self taught, original voice that is oft times beautiful. He spoke with his own wisdom and understandings. It's a voice from his observations of nature, this land and it's people. A few characters are offensive, evil villains(fairly warned be thee) and his heroic characters are the courageous, goodhearted folks of Tennessee.
"I've always felt sort of like in between things. Like I fit in when I was working construction. I more or less could do my job. I didn't get fired. I got paid. I could do it. But it was always sort of like working under cover. Now when I'm meeting academic people and going to these things they have [conferences], basically it's still the same thing. I'm still under cover. Then, I was sort of a closet intellectual passing as a construction worker. Now, I'm a construction worker passing as an academic."
William Gay
When a man offers up that type of introspection, what sort of book is it he would write ... Twilight.
page 5/6/7
(1951) town folk
"When he noticed the quiltcovered cargo the wagon transported, he called, What you got there, Sandy?
The driver turned and spat and wiped his mouth and glanced back briefly but didn't stay the wagon. Dead folks, he said.
The wagon went on and vanished like some ghostwagon in the vaporous mist rising from the river."
"A fat man in overalls had approached the wagon ... Who all is it, Sandy?
The man pulled back the quilt covering with the faintest flourish ...
Sandy, that girl's half naked. Did you not have enough respect to cover her up?
The man they'd called Sandy spat.
... That's all the undertakin I aim to do. You want to handle em, then you cover em up."
"The dead exhibited in the strawstrewn wagonbed.
A Man or the bloody remnants of one.
A rawboned middleaged woman ...
A girl with hair the color and sheen of a bird's wing ...
A boy of fourteen or fifteen and another younger yet ..."
"... the fat man said suddenly. I never noticed that.
He pointed. A bloody mound of curly hair. A dog in there.
... Reckon why whoever it was killed the dog anyway?
I've thought about that some, Sandy said.
I believe it was just all there was left to kill."
page 22/23
narration
"Here was more. A rubberbanded stack of glossy black-and-white photographs. He slipped off the rubber band to rifle hastily through them.
He dropped them suddenly as if they'd seared his hand ...
He felt infected, poison freezing his nerve and brain..."
"He picked the photographs up carefully by their edges and replaced the rubber band and just sat holding them. What to do with them. These trading cards from beyond the river Styx, picture postcards mailed from Hell."
page 26
narration concerning Tyler(Kenneth) and his father, Old Moose(Mann) Tyler
"You won't amount to a goddamned thing.'
It was a summer of storms that year.
After the old man beat him he'd flee into these windtossed nights.
... he'd turn a face stained with blood and tears into the remote heavens and defy the lightning to take him ...
Then he quit crying altogether and took the beatings he couldn't escape with a kind of stoic and sullen outrage."
page 29
"By the time he died Tyler could have whipped him instead, but he never did it. He never hit him, never cursed him, just did his best to stay out of his way. honoring some biblical restraint of parental honor."
page 57/58
Granville Sutter speaks with Tyler
"We ought to be able to come to terms. You've got some idea about Fenton Breece and you're judgin me by him. Fat and soft and very likely some specie of queer. Let's get it straight right now that me and him ain't nothin alike.
What's he paying you?
I won't lie to you. He's payin me plenty. Because he's got a lot to lose and because he thinks I can stop up the holes where it's spillin out. And make no mistake about it, Tyler, I can. I'm the fix-it man, and you're the problem I been hired to fix."
"I'm goin to lay some folks out to cool if I have to, and I don't particularly care who. But what I want you to think about is the worst thing that can happen.
You know how folks kind of console one another? They say, well it could of been worse. Well, not this time. Believe it.
I am absolutely the worst thing that can happen to you."
page 87
narration on the Harrikin
"Census taking in the Harrikin was haphazard at best. There were folks born here with no birth certificate to show they were alive, folks buried with no papers to show they were dead. The Harrikin grew wild. Livestock wander into the Harrikin and are seen no more. Hunters have vanished as well, even compasses go fey and unreliable.
It was called the Harrikin long before the thirties when the tornado cut a swath through it. Folks called the tornado a harrikin, a hurricane, one fierce storm the same to them as another. This one came up through Alabama in 1933 and set down in the Harrikin as if it had had its ticket punched for there all along. Most of the folk who'd been dispossessed, and some who had't, moved on somewhere else. The Harrikin was becoming a symbol for ill luck."
page 98/99
Tyler caught sneakthievin food from a woman's shack in the woods
"Like visitors in some curious museum they stood side by side looking at a painting. That's the rapture, she said. When the dead awakes and them what's goin goes.
Where do you reckon you'll be on that great getting up morning?
Tyler thought about it. He studied the picture. As far away from this mess as I can get, he said.
I reckon I'll just wait till they get up another load."
page 115/116
Tyler meets Mr.Bookbinder
"Hidy, the boy said.
How do, the old man said. Warmin up some, ain't it?
Aren't you Mr.Bookbinder?
I'm Hollis Bookbinder. I ain't never been Mistered too much. Who might you be?
My name's Tyler.
I ain't had the rest of my mornin coffee. How about you?
I didn't have any at all.
Then I reckon you ready for some.
The coffee when the old man brought it was opaque and dark and so strong it almost required chewing."
page 119
Tyler with Bookbinder
"Tyler rose. Well, I guess I better get on. I got a long way to go.
I wouldn't worry too much about Sutter. Likely he's forgot about you ...
No. He's not forgot. There's something the matter with him. When he comes here, just tell him where I went. I didn't mean to mix you up in this.
I ain't tellin him jackshit. I reckon I can set on my own front porch and drink a cup of coffee with whoever I want to. But if that stuff about Sutter is so, you need to be anywhere else besides the Harrikin."
page 127/129
Tyler and the Harrikin Witch
"You got a potion that'll keep a man from killing you?
Her eyes remarked the gun. Looks to me like you totin around a potion'd do that.
I don't want to kill anybody. I just want to keep from getting killed.
How come this feller wantin to kill you?
An undertaker hired him to, I reckon.
I'm a old woman, but I never knowed undertakin to be so slow they had to kill folks for business.
There's somethin about you. Some folks say more than they know. You say considerable less. There's somethin about you, and I don't know of it's a great good or a great evil."
page 137
Granville Sutter's thoughts
"After a while he slept or thought he slept. He dreamed or dreamed he did. Anymore the line between dreams and reality was ambiguous at best. For years he'd felt madness sniffing his tracks like an unwanted dog he couldn't stay shut of."
page 204
" ... and I learnt somethin right then and there. I was learnin it late, but I reckon that's better than never. There's folks you just don't need. You're better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain't in it."
December 12, 2020
4.5 stars
“The living are capable of revenge the dead cannot exact.”
It might be December, but this is not a warm and fuzzy holiday story! I even feel a little bit penitent simply posting a review of Twilight this month. Some people may be decorating trees, baking cookies, frying latkes, lighting candles, and trying to spread as much joy as possible without spreading contagion. What I’m guessing most folks are not doing, however, is digging up graves or practicing a dash of necrophilia. So be warned! To be fair, I read this in November, so I’m not deliberately trying to turn anyone’s stomach this month. Although considering the year we’ve had, I guess a story like this is less shocking than it would have been at any other time, in my life at least.
“Something in his life that had been without form was taking shape. A dark, cauled shape that stood to the side and watched him with hooded, expressionless eyes.”
Visiting the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future is a walk in the woods compared to this freakish, twisted story! A shunned, perverted undertaker meets a crazed, bloodthirsty felon meets a justice-seeking teen and his gorgeous older sister. When justice turns to obsession, these two siblings dig up more than they can handle. What follows is a mad dash through one of the most godforsaken places on the planet. The Harrikin is a decaying wilderness void of light and humanity, with the exception of those you might find if you were to lift up a rock and catch a glimpse at what seethes just below. Evil lurks and threatens to corrupt. It may seep into your very bones.
“What had been and harbingers of what was to be lay down like lovers and archaic machinery still belabored a weary earth already under sentence. A vindictive fate stalked him while still in the musky cribs and just beyond the spectrum of his sight an albino whore plied her craft and the very air was electric with old violence, pregnant with more yet to come.”
This is Southern gothic at its finest – and darkest! William Gay writes with a lush prose that begs you to keep reading no matter the subject. He is gifted with economy yet an unexpected artistry that delights. The moral ambiguity of the story as a whole is sure to satisfy the most discerning of readers. For me personally, this was close to a perfect novel. However, I can’t help but hold back that last half-star in order to highlight my preference for Gay’s Provinces of Night, a book that dazzled me even more. The superb characterizations and my emotional response mark it as the more sophisticated of the two. Do yourself a favor though and read both!
“There’s things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross ‘em you got to take what comes.”
“The living are capable of revenge the dead cannot exact.”
It might be December, but this is not a warm and fuzzy holiday story! I even feel a little bit penitent simply posting a review of Twilight this month. Some people may be decorating trees, baking cookies, frying latkes, lighting candles, and trying to spread as much joy as possible without spreading contagion. What I’m guessing most folks are not doing, however, is digging up graves or practicing a dash of necrophilia. So be warned! To be fair, I read this in November, so I’m not deliberately trying to turn anyone’s stomach this month. Although considering the year we’ve had, I guess a story like this is less shocking than it would have been at any other time, in my life at least.
“Something in his life that had been without form was taking shape. A dark, cauled shape that stood to the side and watched him with hooded, expressionless eyes.”
Visiting the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future is a walk in the woods compared to this freakish, twisted story! A shunned, perverted undertaker meets a crazed, bloodthirsty felon meets a justice-seeking teen and his gorgeous older sister. When justice turns to obsession, these two siblings dig up more than they can handle. What follows is a mad dash through one of the most godforsaken places on the planet. The Harrikin is a decaying wilderness void of light and humanity, with the exception of those you might find if you were to lift up a rock and catch a glimpse at what seethes just below. Evil lurks and threatens to corrupt. It may seep into your very bones.
“What had been and harbingers of what was to be lay down like lovers and archaic machinery still belabored a weary earth already under sentence. A vindictive fate stalked him while still in the musky cribs and just beyond the spectrum of his sight an albino whore plied her craft and the very air was electric with old violence, pregnant with more yet to come.”
This is Southern gothic at its finest – and darkest! William Gay writes with a lush prose that begs you to keep reading no matter the subject. He is gifted with economy yet an unexpected artistry that delights. The moral ambiguity of the story as a whole is sure to satisfy the most discerning of readers. For me personally, this was close to a perfect novel. However, I can’t help but hold back that last half-star in order to highlight my preference for Gay’s Provinces of Night, a book that dazzled me even more. The superb characterizations and my emotional response mark it as the more sophisticated of the two. Do yourself a favor though and read both!
“There’s things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross ‘em you got to take what comes.”
June 29, 2018
And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call
Southern Gothic
. The very best of it.
Unfortunately named, please be clear this book has absolutely nothing to do with sexy, sparkling vampires. That’s waaaaaay over there, in a different section of the library. (Off you go, bye bye now!) Nope, instead, this story is riddled with the rot and reek of corpses. A twisted undertaker who is more repellant than the lifeless bodies he inters. The moral vacuity of a murderous criminal, intent on cleaning up a messy situation. The devotion of a teenage brother to his sister.
And, the most elegant prose infused with the heat of a Tennessee summer’s electrical storm, of steaming earth pulsing with blind, wiggling worms. William Gay brings the grotesque to the surface unlike anyone I’ve read before. His descriptions! Really, I was underlining something on pretty much every page. A few snippets:
…black slashes of inkblack trees against a mottled red sky…
…yellowflecked eyes as compassionless as a cat’s…
…the ruined mansion with its enormous keep of hoarded silence…
…a gaudy Christmas moon candled up out of the pines…
There is a vividness in his words that leaps up, screaming to life. A corrupt, dangerous life. One that belongs on the big screen, and that brings to mind No Country for Old Men.
Also, his dialogue rocks. It is so fucking tough, Clint Eastwood could be saying all the lines, biting a stubby, hand-rolled cigarette. It’s got the cleverness and mood of Raymond Chandler, had he lived in the deep south.
This is a simple story at its core. It’s a fairy tale you wouldn’t tell your children, complete with a haunted wood, a witch, a wolf in disguise, and innocent siblings led down the wrong path. It’s also an old fashioned game of cat-and-mouse. Young Tyler is hunted by Granville Sutter in a chase that feels eerily predestined, wheels set in motion by Tyler’s innocence of the world’s merciless tilt.
Dark, filled with decay and madness, people in this book are living in all sorts of disrepair, doling out the same cruelty to others that was dealt to them. Flannery O’Connor would give her nod of approval to this coming of age adventure. And so do I, with the excitement of having discovered a new favourite book.
There’s a wickedness in this world, and I try to stay clear of it, but this time I think it’s come in the door and set down at my table.
Unfortunately named, please be clear this book has absolutely nothing to do with sexy, sparkling vampires. That’s waaaaaay over there, in a different section of the library. (Off you go, bye bye now!) Nope, instead, this story is riddled with the rot and reek of corpses. A twisted undertaker who is more repellant than the lifeless bodies he inters. The moral vacuity of a murderous criminal, intent on cleaning up a messy situation. The devotion of a teenage brother to his sister.
And, the most elegant prose infused with the heat of a Tennessee summer’s electrical storm, of steaming earth pulsing with blind, wiggling worms. William Gay brings the grotesque to the surface unlike anyone I’ve read before. His descriptions! Really, I was underlining something on pretty much every page. A few snippets:
…black slashes of inkblack trees against a mottled red sky…
…yellowflecked eyes as compassionless as a cat’s…
…the ruined mansion with its enormous keep of hoarded silence…
…a gaudy Christmas moon candled up out of the pines…
There is a vividness in his words that leaps up, screaming to life. A corrupt, dangerous life. One that belongs on the big screen, and that brings to mind No Country for Old Men.
Also, his dialogue rocks. It is so fucking tough, Clint Eastwood could be saying all the lines, biting a stubby, hand-rolled cigarette. It’s got the cleverness and mood of Raymond Chandler, had he lived in the deep south.
This is a simple story at its core. It’s a fairy tale you wouldn’t tell your children, complete with a haunted wood, a witch, a wolf in disguise, and innocent siblings led down the wrong path. It’s also an old fashioned game of cat-and-mouse. Young Tyler is hunted by Granville Sutter in a chase that feels eerily predestined, wheels set in motion by Tyler’s innocence of the world’s merciless tilt.
Dark, filled with decay and madness, people in this book are living in all sorts of disrepair, doling out the same cruelty to others that was dealt to them. Flannery O’Connor would give her nod of approval to this coming of age adventure. And so do I, with the excitement of having discovered a new favourite book.
There’s a wickedness in this world, and I try to stay clear of it, but this time I think it’s come in the door and set down at my table.
November 23, 2018
Tennessee hill country, in the year of 1951, there is something rotten afoot. An undertaker's vile secrets are laid bare. Watch for hands moving and twitching like flesh-colored spiders, and look upon an ancient apple orchard with blackened malformed trees. Kudzu running rampant, strangling everything in its wake. Beware the whistlin' well, and steer clear of Sutter. There's something the matter with him. This is a right smart darker than William Gay's Provinces of Night. Southern Gothic to the core, this one is full of true grit. Five stars, no contest.
July 2, 2017
Twilight: William Gay's Novel of Madness and Murder
William Gay's "Twilight" was chosen as the Moderator's Selection for by our Co-Moderator Laura Webber, "The Tall Woman. This novel was also previously read by "The Trail" in 2014. Come join us!
William Gay, October 27, 1941-February 23, 2012, Hohenwald, TN
I had the good fortune to meet William Gay on two occasions. The first was on his book tour with Provinces of Night. I had read The Long Home when it appeared in paperback, recognized there was a special voice that had burst on the scene, and acquired a first edition of his first novel. When his anthology of short stories, I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories appeared I bought that too. Each work was an exceptional read. At the time I bought those first works by Gay, I had no idea if I would ever meet him or not.
Gay always struck me with his easy going way. His form of dress was unconventional. Both times I met him he was wearing carpenter's overalls, rough boots, and either a shirt of insulated underwear or a river neck shirt. I imagine it was a simple underwear shirt.
The last time I saw Gay was on his tour with Twilight. He sauntered in The Alabama Booksmith in Homewood, Alabama. He had added a checked flannel shirt to the outfit I had seen him in previously. Jake Reiss, the owner, asked him if he was about ready to get started. "Right after I go to the bath room and step outside to burn one. I waited for Gay to approach the door to the porch outside and asked if he minded company. "Naw. Come on." We went outside and burned a cigarette. I've never escaped that vice, nor apparently did he.
We talked a little about his books. I told him I had "The Long Home" and "I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down." He nodded. "I'm happy to sign them." Then he looked over and said, "Wait until you meet Sutter." I told him I'd be looking for him. "You can't miss him," Gay said.
We went inside. The signing began. Some folks didn't know what to make out of William Gay. He wasn't what they were accustomed to seeing at a book signing. I suppose that's one of the things I liked the best about him.
For what it's worth, "Let's burn one" entered my phrases of Southern idiom. I reserve it for my smoking friends. There are a few of us left. We huddle on the screened porch in the winter. A cup of hot coffee helps. If it's night time and the mercury's really dropping, a shot of whiskey in the coffee helps a little more. We sweat on the screened porch in the summer, trying to catch a breeze from old time oscillating fans. A glass of lemonade goes down good. We recognize we are persona non grata, and try to spare our non-smoking friends and loved ones the second hand hazards of our vice that we know is probably shortening our lives.
Call it a recognition of "twilight," an intimation of mortality. We are rather resigned to it. At one time or another all of us have said, "None of us is gettin' out of here alive."
When you read "Twilight" by William Gay, the image of twilight is repeated a number of times at key sections of the book. The timbre of the light changes, too. At times, the light is so obscured by mist you can't tell which way is up or down, or what direction you're headed. You're lost. Whether good or evil is going to prevail is any body's guess almost to the last page.
Are you comfortable with the twilight of your life?
My grandmother always told me there's people in this world that just don't look quite right out of their eyes. Over the years, I learned she was right. There are those people you look into there eyes, and there's nothing behind them. There's no conscience, no sense of remorse. Fact is, they'd just as soon kill you as look at you.
William Gay draws you into a page turning frenzy. His prose is spare, lean, and devoid of words unnecessary to propel his story forward. Then the man can amaze you with vivid imagery that is more poetry than prose. You get the sense that each word has been carefully parsed from every other possible synonym that might have been dropped into the same place. But without that careful parsing, the words wouldn't have been right.
The novel is divided into two parts. For the sake of brevity, I'll call the first part "The Town, and the second part "The Harrikin." Each is a setting unique unto itself. Peopled with characters that you would not find in other than the place Gay put them. They wouldn't fit. That is, no one but Granville Sutter and Kenneth Tyler who become parts of both worlds.
The story line is fairly simple and straight forward. However, as you read it, you realize you are in the hands of a master writer.
THE TOWN
The time is 1951 in a small Tennessee Town.
Kenneth and Corrie Tyler, the offspring of bootlegger Moose Tyler have made a startling discovery. Fenton Breece, the town undertaker, got good money from the Tyler family to put Moose away right, including an expensive vault. At Corrie's insistence, she's had Kenneth dig up the grave. The vault's gone. Moose only has half a suit on. He's naked from the waist down. Somebody has mutilated him, taking his male unit and family jewels. The inspection of other graves yields further proof that Fenton Breece has some peculiar notions for dealing with the dead, male and female alike.
Breece is the butt of jokes of the town's men. His weak efforts of showing interest in women are rebuffed by raucous laughter. One citizen says, "You know Fenton Breece isn't lying when his mouth isn't moving."
Corrie makes it her mission to extract justice from Fenton Breece. Kenneth questions what she expects to accomplish. After all, Kenneth isn't that interested. His Daddy had been a terror to him when Kenneth was a child.
Corrie's about right. Folks in these parts hold great respect for their dead. Go messin' with a cemetery or desecrating the corpse of a beloved ancestor is worse than stepping into a nest of yellow jackets.
Out in the country in the churchyards there are old sagging dinner tables that have been there most likely for generations. Attend a dinner on the grounds. Listen to the hymn singing and watch the living attend to the graves of their dead. In my county one old cemetery was vandalized. Ancient tombstones turned over and broken. Young people obviously. They had the bad sense to leave spray painted pentagrams identifying themselves as devil worshipers in the minds of the aggrieved. "No, we can't give'em the death penalty."
Dinner on the Grounds
Corrie confronts Fenton Breece.
Fenton sputters that he'll make things right. That he'll replace the vault, that he'll make reparations.
Tension ratchets up when Kenneth steals Breece's briefcase which holds the demented mortician's ugly secrets. There's an ugly stack of photographs. Fenton Breece is a necrophiliac. Fenton is capable of committing acts that raise the hair on the back of your neck. But he lacks the spine to get his own dirty secrets covered up.
As Gay said, "Wait till you meet Sutter."
Granville Sutter is one of those men my grandmother would have said didn't look right out of his eyes. He's gotten off of a murder charge on a lesser included offense. He has the knack of terrifying the populous of the entire town. When Sutter tells anyone he'll see them later, nothing good will come of it.
Breece cuts a deal with the devil. Get his photographs back, he'll pay Sutter $15,000.00. Sutter has no compunction about killing Corrie and Kenneth Tyler. They just don't know a hell hound is on their trail, yet.
Even Breece recognizes he's made a dangerous deal.
Something happens to put Corrie into the clutches of Fenton Breece. Don't ask me. I'm not telling.
The HARRIKIN
Mentor and protégé? Wait. Are you feeling a bit uneasy?
The Harrikin, where a man gets lost, where a compass won't show true north
It's a one on one contest between Kenneth Tyler and Granville Sutter. Kenneth is on his way to Ackerman Field where there's a Sheriff Bellwether who can't be bought. There's a District Attorney itching to bring Sutter to justice, too.
All Kenneth has to do is cross the Harrikin, a tangled wilderness, where it's so easy to lose one's way. People have gone in there and never come out of there again. Folks who live there now don't want to be found. They don't have social security numbers, don't care for the government, and the government long ago lost interest in them. It started in 1933 with a storm, a tornado or hurricane that blew into Tennessee up from Alabama.
It is a world that might have been the creation of the Brother's Grimm. Perhaps, Hieronymous Bosch. It is haunted by abandoned towns. It is a world of abandoned mines with shafts overgrown by weeds, where a man might step, slip, and never be heard to hit the bottom. A witch woman lives deep in the heart of the Harrikin.
Nearby is the old Perrie Mansion, formerly the scene of many a ball and party. Until a balcony filled with merrymakers were spilled from it when it collapsed. Now the witch woman tells Kenneth that on some nights you can still hear the music, the laughter, and then the screams.
The witch woman advises Kenneth,
There is Bookbinder, the old man who raises goats and keeps them as pets. He shares coffee with Kenneth.
There is a family, mother, father, daughter, son. They feed Kenneth.
On the chase for Kenneth, Sutter will encounter many that Kenneth has met. Some will live. Some will die.
From time to time Sutter will sleep. His sleep is troubled by dreams.
A reckoning is coming. William Gay's prose drives you relentlessly to a haunting conclusion. When you've reached the end, ask yourself a question. If one contends with evil too much, too long, can you escape without being caught in its tendrils? Gay leaves the reader much to ponder.
One last word of advice. If a 1950 Black Buick Roadmaster pulls up and you're hitchin' a ride, keep walkin'.
EXTRAS! EXTRAS!
William Gay's NYTimes Obituary, February 29, 2012
William Gay (1941-2012) A Tribute from Oxford American, March 8, 2012
So Lost: At Home with William Gay
William Gay talks about his life and reads at the Clarksville Writer's Conference, 2010
William Gay reads from Twilight at the Clarksville Writer's Conference, 2011
William Gay's "Twilight" was chosen as the Moderator's Selection for by our Co-Moderator Laura Webber, "The Tall Woman. This novel was also previously read by "The Trail" in 2014. Come join us!
“There’s folks you just don’t need. You’re better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain’t in it.”
William Gay, October 27, 1941-February 23, 2012, Hohenwald, TN
I had the good fortune to meet William Gay on two occasions. The first was on his book tour with Provinces of Night. I had read The Long Home when it appeared in paperback, recognized there was a special voice that had burst on the scene, and acquired a first edition of his first novel. When his anthology of short stories, I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories appeared I bought that too. Each work was an exceptional read. At the time I bought those first works by Gay, I had no idea if I would ever meet him or not.
Gay always struck me with his easy going way. His form of dress was unconventional. Both times I met him he was wearing carpenter's overalls, rough boots, and either a shirt of insulated underwear or a river neck shirt. I imagine it was a simple underwear shirt.
The last time I saw Gay was on his tour with Twilight. He sauntered in The Alabama Booksmith in Homewood, Alabama. He had added a checked flannel shirt to the outfit I had seen him in previously. Jake Reiss, the owner, asked him if he was about ready to get started. "Right after I go to the bath room and step outside to burn one. I waited for Gay to approach the door to the porch outside and asked if he minded company. "Naw. Come on." We went outside and burned a cigarette. I've never escaped that vice, nor apparently did he.
We talked a little about his books. I told him I had "The Long Home" and "I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down." He nodded. "I'm happy to sign them." Then he looked over and said, "Wait until you meet Sutter." I told him I'd be looking for him. "You can't miss him," Gay said.
We went inside. The signing began. Some folks didn't know what to make out of William Gay. He wasn't what they were accustomed to seeing at a book signing. I suppose that's one of the things I liked the best about him.
For what it's worth, "Let's burn one" entered my phrases of Southern idiom. I reserve it for my smoking friends. There are a few of us left. We huddle on the screened porch in the winter. A cup of hot coffee helps. If it's night time and the mercury's really dropping, a shot of whiskey in the coffee helps a little more. We sweat on the screened porch in the summer, trying to catch a breeze from old time oscillating fans. A glass of lemonade goes down good. We recognize we are persona non grata, and try to spare our non-smoking friends and loved ones the second hand hazards of our vice that we know is probably shortening our lives.
Call it a recognition of "twilight," an intimation of mortality. We are rather resigned to it. At one time or another all of us have said, "None of us is gettin' out of here alive."
When you read "Twilight" by William Gay, the image of twilight is repeated a number of times at key sections of the book. The timbre of the light changes, too. At times, the light is so obscured by mist you can't tell which way is up or down, or what direction you're headed. You're lost. Whether good or evil is going to prevail is any body's guess almost to the last page.
Are you comfortable with the twilight of your life?
My grandmother always told me there's people in this world that just don't look quite right out of their eyes. Over the years, I learned she was right. There are those people you look into there eyes, and there's nothing behind them. There's no conscience, no sense of remorse. Fact is, they'd just as soon kill you as look at you.
William Gay draws you into a page turning frenzy. His prose is spare, lean, and devoid of words unnecessary to propel his story forward. Then the man can amaze you with vivid imagery that is more poetry than prose. You get the sense that each word has been carefully parsed from every other possible synonym that might have been dropped into the same place. But without that careful parsing, the words wouldn't have been right.
The novel is divided into two parts. For the sake of brevity, I'll call the first part "The Town, and the second part "The Harrikin." Each is a setting unique unto itself. Peopled with characters that you would not find in other than the place Gay put them. They wouldn't fit. That is, no one but Granville Sutter and Kenneth Tyler who become parts of both worlds.
The story line is fairly simple and straight forward. However, as you read it, you realize you are in the hands of a master writer.
THE TOWN
“The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.” --Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
The time is 1951 in a small Tennessee Town.
Kenneth and Corrie Tyler, the offspring of bootlegger Moose Tyler have made a startling discovery. Fenton Breece, the town undertaker, got good money from the Tyler family to put Moose away right, including an expensive vault. At Corrie's insistence, she's had Kenneth dig up the grave. The vault's gone. Moose only has half a suit on. He's naked from the waist down. Somebody has mutilated him, taking his male unit and family jewels. The inspection of other graves yields further proof that Fenton Breece has some peculiar notions for dealing with the dead, male and female alike.
Breece is the butt of jokes of the town's men. His weak efforts of showing interest in women are rebuffed by raucous laughter. One citizen says, "You know Fenton Breece isn't lying when his mouth isn't moving."
Corrie makes it her mission to extract justice from Fenton Breece. Kenneth questions what she expects to accomplish. After all, Kenneth isn't that interested. His Daddy had been a terror to him when Kenneth was a child.
“What do you think we ought to do? she asked. Do? Put his sorry ass away. Tell the law and let them open the graves themselves. Put him away forever in some crazyhouse. They’d have to. You think they would? I know they would. What would you do with him? There’s supposed to be respect for the dead. It’s the way we evolved or something. It’s genetic. This man here…he wouldn’t cull anything. He’d do anything.”
Corrie's about right. Folks in these parts hold great respect for their dead. Go messin' with a cemetery or desecrating the corpse of a beloved ancestor is worse than stepping into a nest of yellow jackets.
Out in the country in the churchyards there are old sagging dinner tables that have been there most likely for generations. Attend a dinner on the grounds. Listen to the hymn singing and watch the living attend to the graves of their dead. In my county one old cemetery was vandalized. Ancient tombstones turned over and broken. Young people obviously. They had the bad sense to leave spray painted pentagrams identifying themselves as devil worshipers in the minds of the aggrieved. "No, we can't give'em the death penalty."
Dinner on the Grounds
Corrie confronts Fenton Breece.
“You buried my father, she began. He nodded unctuously. He couldn’t wonder what this was about. He remembered the girl, and he remembered the old man, but he couldn’t fathom what she wanted unless someone else was dead. He kept glancing at the purse, and he couldn’t remember if it had all been paid or not. Maybe she owed him money. Mann Tyler, she said. He had an insurance. We paid for an eight-hundred-dollar steel vault to go over his casket, and it’s not there anymore. The room was very quiet. She could hear rain at the window. Breece got up and crossed the room. He peereddown the hall and closed the door. He went back and sat down. His hands placed together atop the desk formed an arch. He was watching her and she could see sick fear rise up in his eyes. Just not there, she went on. And that’s not all. He’s buried without all the clothes we bought for him, and he’s been…mutilated. She just watched him. A tic pulsed at the corner of one bulging eye like something monstrous stirring beneath a thin veneer of flesh.”
“What do you want? You’re finished. You don’t begin to suspect how finished you are. When all these people hear about what you’ve done to their folks, they’re just going to mob you. They’d hang you, but you won’t last that long. They’ll tear you apart like a pack of dogs.”
Fenton sputters that he'll make things right. That he'll replace the vault, that he'll make reparations.
Tension ratchets up when Kenneth steals Breece's briefcase which holds the demented mortician's ugly secrets. There's an ugly stack of photographs. Fenton Breece is a necrophiliac. Fenton is capable of committing acts that raise the hair on the back of your neck. But he lacks the spine to get his own dirty secrets covered up.
As Gay said, "Wait till you meet Sutter."
Granville Sutter is one of those men my grandmother would have said didn't look right out of his eyes. He's gotten off of a murder charge on a lesser included offense. He has the knack of terrifying the populous of the entire town. When Sutter tells anyone he'll see them later, nothing good will come of it.
Breece cuts a deal with the devil. Get his photographs back, he'll pay Sutter $15,000.00. Sutter has no compunction about killing Corrie and Kenneth Tyler. They just don't know a hell hound is on their trail, yet.
Even Breece recognizes he's made a dangerous deal.
“It was the first time they had ever talked face to face and Breece divined in a moment of dizzy revelation something about Sutter that no one had noticed before. Why, he is mad, Breece thought. He’s not what people say about him at all. He’s not just mean as a snake or eccentric or independent. He’s as mad as a hatter, and I don’t know how they’ve let him go so long.”
Something happens to put Corrie into the clutches of Fenton Breece. Don't ask me. I'm not telling.
The HARRIKIN
“When Tyler fled and Sutter pursued him, this was the closest thing to a wilderness there was, and there was really no thought of going anywhere else, and as these fugitives, mentor and protégé, fled from a world that still adhered to form and order they were fleeing not only geographically but chronologically, for they were fleeing into the past.”
Mentor and protégé? Wait. Are you feeling a bit uneasy?
The Harrikin, where a man gets lost, where a compass won't show true north
It's a one on one contest between Kenneth Tyler and Granville Sutter. Kenneth is on his way to Ackerman Field where there's a Sheriff Bellwether who can't be bought. There's a District Attorney itching to bring Sutter to justice, too.
All Kenneth has to do is cross the Harrikin, a tangled wilderness, where it's so easy to lose one's way. People have gone in there and never come out of there again. Folks who live there now don't want to be found. They don't have social security numbers, don't care for the government, and the government long ago lost interest in them. It started in 1933 with a storm, a tornado or hurricane that blew into Tennessee up from Alabama.
It is a world that might have been the creation of the Brother's Grimm. Perhaps, Hieronymous Bosch. It is haunted by abandoned towns. It is a world of abandoned mines with shafts overgrown by weeds, where a man might step, slip, and never be heard to hit the bottom. A witch woman lives deep in the heart of the Harrikin.
Nearby is the old Perrie Mansion, formerly the scene of many a ball and party. Until a balcony filled with merrymakers were spilled from it when it collapsed. Now the witch woman tells Kenneth that on some nights you can still hear the music, the laughter, and then the screams.
The witch woman advises Kenneth,
“There’s somethin about you. Some folks say more than they know. You say considerable less. There’s somethin about you, and I don’t know if it’s a great good or a great evil. Well. You being a witch and all, looks like you’d know. I would if you wadn’t blockin it out. You’re hidin somethin.”
There's things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross 'em you got to take what comes."
There is Bookbinder, the old man who raises goats and keeps them as pets. He shares coffee with Kenneth.
There is a family, mother, father, daughter, son. They feed Kenneth.
On the chase for Kenneth, Sutter will encounter many that Kenneth has met. Some will live. Some will die.
From time to time Sutter will sleep. His sleep is troubled by dreams.
"After a while he slept or thought he slept. He dreamed or dreamed he did. Anymore the line between dreams and reality was ambiguous at best. For years he'd felt madness sniffing his tracks like an unwanted dog he couldn't stay shut of. He'd kick it away and it would whimper and cower down spinelessly and he'd go on, but when he looked back over his shoulder it would be shambling toward him, watching him with wary apprehension but coming on anyway."
A reckoning is coming. William Gay's prose drives you relentlessly to a haunting conclusion. When you've reached the end, ask yourself a question. If one contends with evil too much, too long, can you escape without being caught in its tendrils? Gay leaves the reader much to ponder.
One last word of advice. If a 1950 Black Buick Roadmaster pulls up and you're hitchin' a ride, keep walkin'.
EXTRAS! EXTRAS!
William Gay's NYTimes Obituary, February 29, 2012
William Gay (1941-2012) A Tribute from Oxford American, March 8, 2012
So Lost: At Home with William Gay
William Gay talks about his life and reads at the Clarksville Writer's Conference, 2010
William Gay reads from Twilight at the Clarksville Writer's Conference, 2011
April 22, 2021
My enthusiastic 5 star rating doesn't necessarily mean William Gay's Twilight will be everyone's cup of tea. It won't. Like a dark and twisted Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the South, Gay's nightmarish tale is only for the sturdy and sound of heart.
Set in his familiar landscape of rural Tennessee 'half in shadow, half in thin light', Gay spins an age-old tale of innocence vs evil with elements of the grotesque and perverse that so well define the Southern Gothic.
It's 1951 and Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie have misgivings about the local undertaker, Fenton Breece, and the way he buried their bootlegger father. Exhuming the body, they discover their concerns were justified and dig up more graves to learn of the horrific, grotesque manner in which Breece desecrated the dead. Poor, desperate and pissed, they attempt to blackmail the undertaker who is having none of it. He hires the local strongman and psycho killer Granville Sutter:
Granville Sutter is right up there among the most memorable villains I've come across in Southern Gothic or any genre of fiction.
Sutter is likened to 'some baleful god remonstrating with a world he'd created that would not do his bidding' So this is the man young Tyler is up against in his foot race through the 'Harrikan', the deep dark pines 'where the ghosts hold sway' in his bid to find Sherriff Bellweather and justice.
We are held captive by Gays evocative lush prose.You can open up the book almost anywhere and find passages that you want to read slowly and again:
Indeed, the Harrikan that they navigate, is less a physical landscape than a dark and twisted warren of decaying Southern memory- a place of hidden mineshafts and rusted forgotten equipment, derelict mansions and abandoned shanties. A place of loneliness and madness.
And when things seem to get a bit too heavy handed, Gay expertly pulls back the reins with his brand of dark nervous humour, where you feel a bit guilty about smiling, nevermind laughing.
Of the 3 novels I've read by the late author, Twilight, despite being the most macabre of the three (which include The Long Home and Fugitives of the Heart) is my favorite. The plot, while simple, is the most developed and the characters more fleshed out.
With the ending, there is satisfaction, as there must be, but when authors such as Gay and Cormac McCarthy (with whom Gay seems inextricably linked) hold such a dismal view of humanity, there can be no resolution, only respite against a longer road ahead.
Set in his familiar landscape of rural Tennessee 'half in shadow, half in thin light', Gay spins an age-old tale of innocence vs evil with elements of the grotesque and perverse that so well define the Southern Gothic.
It's 1951 and Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie have misgivings about the local undertaker, Fenton Breece, and the way he buried their bootlegger father. Exhuming the body, they discover their concerns were justified and dig up more graves to learn of the horrific, grotesque manner in which Breece desecrated the dead. Poor, desperate and pissed, they attempt to blackmail the undertaker who is having none of it. He hires the local strongman and psycho killer Granville Sutter:
'What is it with you, Mr Sutter? Do you think you can kill the whole world? Slaughter a long line of jurors who vote their consciences ? Can you silent them all? Do you have access to that many firepokers?You'd have to hire assistants in your war against order. You're a busy man, Mr Sutter. All those widows to create, homes to burn, land to salt
'You just a bad loser, Sutter said. He grinned like a Cheshire cat. Small yellow feathers about his jaws.'
Granville Sutter is right up there among the most memorable villains I've come across in Southern Gothic or any genre of fiction.
'For years he'd felt madness sniffing his tracks like an unwanted dog he couldn't stay shut of. He'd kick it away and it would whimper and cower down spinelessly and he'd go on, but when he looked back over his shoulder it would be shambling toward him, watching him with wary apprehension but coming on anyway'
Sutter is likened to 'some baleful god remonstrating with a world he'd created that would not do his bidding' So this is the man young Tyler is up against in his foot race through the 'Harrikan', the deep dark pines 'where the ghosts hold sway' in his bid to find Sherriff Bellweather and justice.
We are held captive by Gays evocative lush prose.You can open up the book almost anywhere and find passages that you want to read slowly and again:
There in the shadows he seemed a darker shadow than those he moved among, some beast composed wholly of the ectoplasm of the night and with some arcane magnetism drawing to itself old angers and discontents and secret and forbidden yearnings freefloating in the humming and electric dark'
Indeed, the Harrikan that they navigate, is less a physical landscape than a dark and twisted warren of decaying Southern memory- a place of hidden mineshafts and rusted forgotten equipment, derelict mansions and abandoned shanties. A place of loneliness and madness.
And when things seem to get a bit too heavy handed, Gay expertly pulls back the reins with his brand of dark nervous humour, where you feel a bit guilty about smiling, nevermind laughing.
Of the 3 novels I've read by the late author, Twilight, despite being the most macabre of the three (which include The Long Home and Fugitives of the Heart) is my favorite. The plot, while simple, is the most developed and the characters more fleshed out.
With the ending, there is satisfaction, as there must be, but when authors such as Gay and Cormac McCarthy (with whom Gay seems inextricably linked) hold such a dismal view of humanity, there can be no resolution, only respite against a longer road ahead.
October 2, 2014
"It is true this world holds mysteries you do not want to know."
My God, what a good book this was! I am quoting another reviewer with that statement, but that speaks my feelings perfectly. Impossible to speak of plot, but William Gay takes us into the minds of madmen, and the relatively sane, perfectly normal people forced to deal with them. He does this in words and sentences so beautiful and intricate that, even when reading furiously to see what happens next, you must slow down to appreciate his craft. And yet his characters say and think just what is necessary for them.
"I learnt somethin right then and there. I was learnin it late, but I reckon that's better than never. There's folks you just don't need. You're better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain't in it."
See what I mean? I gave this book a 4 star rating immediately upon finishing, but changed it to a 5 right away. Because this book will stay with me for a long time, and it's characters will haunt me.
My God, what a good book this was! I am quoting another reviewer with that statement, but that speaks my feelings perfectly. Impossible to speak of plot, but William Gay takes us into the minds of madmen, and the relatively sane, perfectly normal people forced to deal with them. He does this in words and sentences so beautiful and intricate that, even when reading furiously to see what happens next, you must slow down to appreciate his craft. And yet his characters say and think just what is necessary for them.
"I learnt somethin right then and there. I was learnin it late, but I reckon that's better than never. There's folks you just don't need. You're better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain't in it."
See what I mean? I gave this book a 4 star rating immediately upon finishing, but changed it to a 5 right away. Because this book will stay with me for a long time, and it's characters will haunt me.
June 27, 2018
So. Anybody up for disinterring some dead people? This journey with oddities aplenty reminds me in a way of The Odyssey but oh, so twisted! I loved these teenaged siblings.
Their daddy might've been a pretty vicious bootlegger, but since he had prepaid for a worm-proof burial vault, he was entitled to be entombed in that metal cask for the everafter. The night of his burial, Moose Tyler's youngest child - a boy in his mid teens - was too restless to sleep. As young Tyler paced the wee hours away, walking aimless loops around their little town, he spied his daddy's burial vault being hauled down the macadam by the very undertaker who'd been paid prettily for it. This was how it started.
Tyler and his sister, incensed that their father had been disinterred, try their farfetched story with the local deputy. Unbelieving, he turns a deaf ear. The teenagers know that their family is regarded as dirt, so to prove that their father's body has indeed been dug up and his vault stolen, they begin grave-digging by night. What they find inside their father's casket and subsequently in other coffins is truly disturbing.
Fenton Breece is the affected, wealthy undertaker with very strange appetites, but it is the man he hires to stop the Tyler kids from blabbing who possesses true evil. Sutter is an enforcer, and he knows the woods in that neck of Tennessee like no other. We get glimpses into Sutter's past through his night dreams, and that keeps us from seeing him as cartoonishly bad. When the boy Tyler decides to run, it is that twisted path into a dreamlike forest that Sutter and Twilight follow.
There are surprises aplenty in this incredible story, and it would be a shame to ruin those mind-blowing moments for you. Exquisite writing and imaginative scenes, a few spots of humor are all here in Gay's incredible work.
"Upon contact with the paint the brush had swollen up to twice its size and become virtually unmanageable and it was like trying to paint with a halfgrown housecat."
"A lifetime ago she led him to the first-grade door and released his hand and consigned him to life. Little sister Death, commended to Fenton Breece."
This particular scene is eerily reminiscent of something out of the Blair Witch's forest or from that first pagan season of True Detective. Creepy.
"..began to come upon curious arrangements of sticks strung from trees, lengths of wild cane wired together in designs strange and oblique, some simple and composed of only a few sections, others intricate three-dimensional compositions, and all alike suspended by tiewire and turning slowing in the air like alien windchimes or hieroglyphs from some prior language no one knew anymore."
If you can manage a small dose of necrophilia and appreciate a coming of age story, then get your hands on this Southern Gothic tale. If Quixotic journeys or sibling love ring bells for you, then get this into your hands soon. This one was a dark favorite of a friend of mine who recently left this earthly realm and one he highly recommended. As author Gay was wont to say in this story of traveling through the unknown, he went on. He went on.
Five stars. Favorites shelf.
Their daddy might've been a pretty vicious bootlegger, but since he had prepaid for a worm-proof burial vault, he was entitled to be entombed in that metal cask for the everafter. The night of his burial, Moose Tyler's youngest child - a boy in his mid teens - was too restless to sleep. As young Tyler paced the wee hours away, walking aimless loops around their little town, he spied his daddy's burial vault being hauled down the macadam by the very undertaker who'd been paid prettily for it. This was how it started.
Tyler and his sister, incensed that their father had been disinterred, try their farfetched story with the local deputy. Unbelieving, he turns a deaf ear. The teenagers know that their family is regarded as dirt, so to prove that their father's body has indeed been dug up and his vault stolen, they begin grave-digging by night. What they find inside their father's casket and subsequently in other coffins is truly disturbing.
Fenton Breece is the affected, wealthy undertaker with very strange appetites, but it is the man he hires to stop the Tyler kids from blabbing who possesses true evil. Sutter is an enforcer, and he knows the woods in that neck of Tennessee like no other. We get glimpses into Sutter's past through his night dreams, and that keeps us from seeing him as cartoonishly bad. When the boy Tyler decides to run, it is that twisted path into a dreamlike forest that Sutter and Twilight follow.
There are surprises aplenty in this incredible story, and it would be a shame to ruin those mind-blowing moments for you. Exquisite writing and imaginative scenes, a few spots of humor are all here in Gay's incredible work.
"Upon contact with the paint the brush had swollen up to twice its size and become virtually unmanageable and it was like trying to paint with a halfgrown housecat."
"A lifetime ago she led him to the first-grade door and released his hand and consigned him to life. Little sister Death, commended to Fenton Breece."
This particular scene is eerily reminiscent of something out of the Blair Witch's forest or from that first pagan season of True Detective. Creepy.
"..began to come upon curious arrangements of sticks strung from trees, lengths of wild cane wired together in designs strange and oblique, some simple and composed of only a few sections, others intricate three-dimensional compositions, and all alike suspended by tiewire and turning slowing in the air like alien windchimes or hieroglyphs from some prior language no one knew anymore."
If you can manage a small dose of necrophilia and appreciate a coming of age story, then get your hands on this Southern Gothic tale. If Quixotic journeys or sibling love ring bells for you, then get this into your hands soon. This one was a dark favorite of a friend of mine who recently left this earthly realm and one he highly recommended. As author Gay was wont to say in this story of traveling through the unknown, he went on. He went on.
Five stars. Favorites shelf.
October 18, 2020
What I want you to think about is the worst thing that can happen,
one character warns another in this dark and deliciously twisted Southern Gothic novel. And I couldn’t help but think that's also the author’s way of telling his readers: Can't say I didn’t warn you!
Less than 10 pages in, we've already seen a wagon-load of rotting corpses (including a dead dog wearing....EARRINGS?!?), and joined a teenage brother and sister digging up their own father's grave on a dark, rainy night, only to discover something more gruesome and horrific than anything they could have feared or imagined. To say the local undertaker has been guilty of professional malfeasance would be an obscene understatement.
Desperate to escape their life of grueling poverty in rural, mid-20th century Tennessee, Corrie and Kenneth Tyler decide to attempt blackmailing the wealthy, deranged undertaker, setting in motion a series of shocking events and accelerating awfulness that somehow always manages to subvert expectations.
You know you've ventured into some truly f*cked up, nightmarish territory when that creepy small-town undertaker turns out to be the least disturbing of this novel's two villains. 😳😅
You honestly couldn't get a more quintessentially Southern Gothic novel if you tried to engineer one using a computer algorithm.
It's all here, and all laid on pretty thick: the loquacious, lyrical prose; the rural poverty and pervasive stench of death and decay; the ever-expanding cast of eccentric, slightly ominous secondary characters; and of course the dark depths of depravity into which we frail humans all too easily and frequently sink.
But it's the overall atmosphere that steals the show here for me. Subtlety and restraint aren't exactly William Gay's strengths, but that's honestly what I love most about his writing and this genre overall. It's what I always loved most about William Faulkner as well, the shameless wallowing in the melodrama of it all.
Everywhere you turn, there's a sense of nostalgia and melancholy and loss: lost towns, lost parents, lost loves, lost ideals, lost innocence. This is very much a ghost story without any actual ghosts.
Aside from sagging in the middle somewhat, the story is engrossing, suspenseful, and occasionally even laugh-out-loud funny - if you like your humor PITCH-BLACK, that is.
I was particularly impressed by the rich characterization. There are characters who show up for scarcely more than a chapter but still manage to leave the kind of haunting impression that I usually only get from a novel's main characters.
At first Gay seems to be gunning for Grand Prize in some kind of Faulkner Parody Contest, echoing some of that author's alcohol-fueled excesses. But the bulk of his prose ends up being quite beautiful and elegiac, evocative of Faulkner at the very TOP of his game.
There's an elaborate tapestry of metaphor and allegory here (the "twilight" of the title being just one symbolic thread among many), and a stronger theme of Good struggling against Evil than I expected.
There's things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross em you got to take what comes.
Can't say I didn’t warn you! 🤷♂️😉
Less than 10 pages in, we've already seen a wagon-load of rotting corpses (including a dead dog wearing....EARRINGS?!?), and joined a teenage brother and sister digging up their own father's grave on a dark, rainy night, only to discover something more gruesome and horrific than anything they could have feared or imagined. To say the local undertaker has been guilty of professional malfeasance would be an obscene understatement.
Desperate to escape their life of grueling poverty in rural, mid-20th century Tennessee, Corrie and Kenneth Tyler decide to attempt blackmailing the wealthy, deranged undertaker, setting in motion a series of shocking events and accelerating awfulness that somehow always manages to subvert expectations.
You know you've ventured into some truly f*cked up, nightmarish territory when that creepy small-town undertaker turns out to be the least disturbing of this novel's two villains. 😳😅
You honestly couldn't get a more quintessentially Southern Gothic novel if you tried to engineer one using a computer algorithm.
It's all here, and all laid on pretty thick: the loquacious, lyrical prose; the rural poverty and pervasive stench of death and decay; the ever-expanding cast of eccentric, slightly ominous secondary characters; and of course the dark depths of depravity into which we frail humans all too easily and frequently sink.
But it's the overall atmosphere that steals the show here for me. Subtlety and restraint aren't exactly William Gay's strengths, but that's honestly what I love most about his writing and this genre overall. It's what I always loved most about William Faulkner as well, the shameless wallowing in the melodrama of it all.
Everywhere you turn, there's a sense of nostalgia and melancholy and loss: lost towns, lost parents, lost loves, lost ideals, lost innocence. This is very much a ghost story without any actual ghosts.
Aside from sagging in the middle somewhat, the story is engrossing, suspenseful, and occasionally even laugh-out-loud funny - if you like your humor PITCH-BLACK, that is.
I was particularly impressed by the rich characterization. There are characters who show up for scarcely more than a chapter but still manage to leave the kind of haunting impression that I usually only get from a novel's main characters.
At first Gay seems to be gunning for Grand Prize in some kind of Faulkner Parody Contest, echoing some of that author's alcohol-fueled excesses. But the bulk of his prose ends up being quite beautiful and elegiac, evocative of Faulkner at the very TOP of his game.
There's an elaborate tapestry of metaphor and allegory here (the "twilight" of the title being just one symbolic thread among many), and a stronger theme of Good struggling against Evil than I expected.
There's things in this world better let alone. Things sealed away and not meant to be looked upon. Lines better not crossed, and when you do cross em you got to take what comes.
Can't say I didn’t warn you! 🤷♂️😉
November 27, 2023
I don't know what to think after finishing this book even though I see it has great reviews.
I'm new to the genre of southern grit books so I was expecting a gritty plot with plenty of hard-bitten characters. But I sure wasn't expecting a story like this one.
Spoilers below.
I have to wonder what was going on with William Gay when he created this story. It's not just anyone who could create such characters and imagine this nightmarish plot that's for sure.
For instance, one of the characters, Fenton Breece, is the mortician in a small Tennessee town back in the 1950's and boy does he love his job!
In his spare time he likes to cavort around naked with the female cadavers - after embalming them of course. Unfortunately he has taken a few photos of his high-jinks.
His newest acquisition, Corrie Tyler, he couldn't be more pleased with either. Corrie was considered to be 'hot' back when she was still alive and Breece had desired her for years.
Corrie had enough sense to avoid him at any and all opportunities but now that she's passed on to her heavenly reward she doesn't have any control over what Breece plans to do with her body.
There was one touching scene where Breece and Corrie have their first 'date' if you want to call it that. They're sitting in a small intimate den listening to music while Breece sips his brandy. Since poor Corrie suffered a broken neck she keeps ruining the mood with her head flopping over. Breece patiently keeps re-positioning her head as they listen to Mozart.
I had to ask myself if I really wanted to read about such people in the world. If there are real people like Breece in my community then ignorance is bliss.
The whole book was filled with grotesque people and happenings, except for the hero Kenneth Tyler, Corrie's brother and he's in a heap of trouble.
Tyler happened to steal a bag full of Breece's frisky photos and the only officer of the law he trusts to take care of this little matter is 20 miles away.
Since Tyler's truck is wrecked he will have to walk the 20 miles through a bizarre backwoods cut off from civilization to reach his destination.
Fenton Breece is desperate to regain possession of the photos and he hires a local ne-er do well whose sanity is questionable to kill Tyler and return his photos.
Granville Sutter is his name and I doubt such a depraved, despicable character has even been equaled in the history of book publishing.
He seems to have had mommy and daddy issues whilst a youngster and now he's as mean as a rattlesnake and 10 times worse than Ted Bundy.
Good ole Granville enjoys murdering people so he's hot on Tyler's trail.
By this time I honestly didn't want to spend anymore time with Granville and Breece because it was all so predictable. With every turn of the page their wickedness strains credulity.
If you enjoy reading books that only tell of sorrow and misery without any let up then this is the book for you.
I will be generous to the author and say he really does have some kind of imagination going for him and is also a talented writer.
I'm new to the genre of southern grit books so I was expecting a gritty plot with plenty of hard-bitten characters. But I sure wasn't expecting a story like this one.
Spoilers below.
I have to wonder what was going on with William Gay when he created this story. It's not just anyone who could create such characters and imagine this nightmarish plot that's for sure.
For instance, one of the characters, Fenton Breece, is the mortician in a small Tennessee town back in the 1950's and boy does he love his job!
In his spare time he likes to cavort around naked with the female cadavers - after embalming them of course. Unfortunately he has taken a few photos of his high-jinks.
His newest acquisition, Corrie Tyler, he couldn't be more pleased with either. Corrie was considered to be 'hot' back when she was still alive and Breece had desired her for years.
Corrie had enough sense to avoid him at any and all opportunities but now that she's passed on to her heavenly reward she doesn't have any control over what Breece plans to do with her body.
There was one touching scene where Breece and Corrie have their first 'date' if you want to call it that. They're sitting in a small intimate den listening to music while Breece sips his brandy. Since poor Corrie suffered a broken neck she keeps ruining the mood with her head flopping over. Breece patiently keeps re-positioning her head as they listen to Mozart.
I had to ask myself if I really wanted to read about such people in the world. If there are real people like Breece in my community then ignorance is bliss.
The whole book was filled with grotesque people and happenings, except for the hero Kenneth Tyler, Corrie's brother and he's in a heap of trouble.
Tyler happened to steal a bag full of Breece's frisky photos and the only officer of the law he trusts to take care of this little matter is 20 miles away.
Since Tyler's truck is wrecked he will have to walk the 20 miles through a bizarre backwoods cut off from civilization to reach his destination.
Fenton Breece is desperate to regain possession of the photos and he hires a local ne-er do well whose sanity is questionable to kill Tyler and return his photos.
Granville Sutter is his name and I doubt such a depraved, despicable character has even been equaled in the history of book publishing.
He seems to have had mommy and daddy issues whilst a youngster and now he's as mean as a rattlesnake and 10 times worse than Ted Bundy.
Good ole Granville enjoys murdering people so he's hot on Tyler's trail.
By this time I honestly didn't want to spend anymore time with Granville and Breece because it was all so predictable. With every turn of the page their wickedness strains credulity.
If you enjoy reading books that only tell of sorrow and misery without any let up then this is the book for you.
I will be generous to the author and say he really does have some kind of imagination going for him and is also a talented writer.
May 20, 2024
I don’t write reviews.
“There was more wickedness in the world than you thought, and you’ve stirred it up and got it on you, ain’t you?”
Tyler surely did. He and his sister, Corrie, discovered something dark and twisted under the well-groomed cemetery. Something evilly rotten and corrupt under the awkward facade of the undertaker, Fenton Breece. And when this undertaker did their daddy wrong, the Tylers found that Breece had been doing the whole town dirty, disrespectful and disgusting. Instead of going to the law, Corrie tries to blackmail Breece. But she doesn’t understand true evil and its connection with monsters. Monsters like Granville Sutter, who will stop at nothing to get what he wants, even if it means killing everyone in his path.
“There was more wickedness in the world than you thought, and you’ve stirred it up and got it on you, ain’t you?”
Tyler surely did. He and his sister, Corrie, discovered something dark and twisted under the well-groomed cemetery. Something evilly rotten and corrupt under the awkward facade of the undertaker, Fenton Breece. And when this undertaker did their daddy wrong, the Tylers found that Breece had been doing the whole town dirty, disrespectful and disgusting. Instead of going to the law, Corrie tries to blackmail Breece. But she doesn’t understand true evil and its connection with monsters. Monsters like Granville Sutter, who will stop at nothing to get what he wants, even if it means killing everyone in his path.
March 21, 2019
Whatever happens. Whatever it takes. It’s enough that you know that Fenton Breece ain’t the only man can bury the dead, and the grave ain’t the only place to put ‘em.
Fenton Breece is the undertaker in the town of Centre, Tennessee, and he is one twisted creep. When Corrie and Kenneth Tyler fall upon his macabre secrets, they open up a can of worms and unleash a monster, in the person of Granville Sutter. I would not recommend this book to anyone who has a faint heart, it might not stand the strain.
William Gay is such an instinctive writer that this entire book reads like a conversation. Every person, even the over-the-top characters, seem uncannily real. I found myself holding my breath and not wanting to sit in the dark. I believe I would have jumped ten feet if anyone had knocked on my door while I was reading.
At its heart, this is a book about good and evil; about how easily evil can be admitted into a life; and about how fine the line between sanity and insanity can be.
There’s something about you. Some folks say more than they know. You say considerable less. There’s something about you, and I don’t know if it’s a great good or a great evil.
William Gay is not afraid of dark places or hesitant to show the face of evil. His is the most frightening kind of darkness for me, because it is darkness of the soul and it might actually lurk around any corner in life that you happen to turn.
Then he thought he must have crossed some unmarked border that put him into territories in the land of Nod beyond the pale where folks would shun him for the mark laid on him to show that he’d breeched the boundaries of conduct itself and that he’d passed through doors that had closed softly behind him and only opened from the other side of the pale and that he’d gone down footpaths into wilderness that was forever greener and more rampant and ended up someplace you can’t get back from.
This might well describe the feeling I was left with when I closed this book--as if I had been somewhere it was quite dangerous to go, and doubtful that I would ever be able to come back completely from the experience.
But, oh please, be brave, read this novel. You will not regret it.
Fenton Breece is the undertaker in the town of Centre, Tennessee, and he is one twisted creep. When Corrie and Kenneth Tyler fall upon his macabre secrets, they open up a can of worms and unleash a monster, in the person of Granville Sutter. I would not recommend this book to anyone who has a faint heart, it might not stand the strain.
William Gay is such an instinctive writer that this entire book reads like a conversation. Every person, even the over-the-top characters, seem uncannily real. I found myself holding my breath and not wanting to sit in the dark. I believe I would have jumped ten feet if anyone had knocked on my door while I was reading.
At its heart, this is a book about good and evil; about how easily evil can be admitted into a life; and about how fine the line between sanity and insanity can be.
There’s something about you. Some folks say more than they know. You say considerable less. There’s something about you, and I don’t know if it’s a great good or a great evil.
William Gay is not afraid of dark places or hesitant to show the face of evil. His is the most frightening kind of darkness for me, because it is darkness of the soul and it might actually lurk around any corner in life that you happen to turn.
Then he thought he must have crossed some unmarked border that put him into territories in the land of Nod beyond the pale where folks would shun him for the mark laid on him to show that he’d breeched the boundaries of conduct itself and that he’d passed through doors that had closed softly behind him and only opened from the other side of the pale and that he’d gone down footpaths into wilderness that was forever greener and more rampant and ended up someplace you can’t get back from.
This might well describe the feeling I was left with when I closed this book--as if I had been somewhere it was quite dangerous to go, and doubtful that I would ever be able to come back completely from the experience.
But, oh please, be brave, read this novel. You will not regret it.
February 17, 2020
Open to any page, read any sentence, revel in the gorgeous and luscious southern gothic writing that is deliciously gritty.
It’s dark, dank, and disturbing with a rotting mansion, religious fanatics, moonshiners, crazed characters and some good ol’ boy behaviors. William Gay nailed the southern backwoods personalities and geographies with this perfectly penned account of an unraveled mystery and the ensuing manhunt.
What a gem!
It’s dark, dank, and disturbing with a rotting mansion, religious fanatics, moonshiners, crazed characters and some good ol’ boy behaviors. William Gay nailed the southern backwoods personalities and geographies with this perfectly penned account of an unraveled mystery and the ensuing manhunt.
What a gem!
September 14, 2022
SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
Some writers ask us to suspend belief in order to accept the credibility of their stories. Flannery O’Connor, on the other hand, believed that they had it backwards. She thought that the reader should suspend disbelief and therefore believe that what she had written was something that could have happened no matter how grotesque or irrational it might have seemed.
William Gay agreed. He began his novel Twilight with a two-and-a-half page prologue, which could serve as a test case for the suspension of disbelief. (What follows comes from that prologue and since it is the first thing a reader reads, there is no need for a spoiler alert.)
On those pages he described a wagon hurtling its way into the Tennessee village of Ackerman’s Field. In its bed are five dead bodies that have obviously been murdered, and that’s just the first page. Also in the wagon is a dead dog, but not just any dead dog. This one’s ears have been pierced and a pair of cheap gaudy earrings has been inserted.
The people had been murdered in a wilderness area known by locals as the Harrikin. The driver of the wagon begins telling onlookers about other wild things that were occurring in that wilderness:
If I had not suspended disbelief I would have been through with this book after reading the prologue. However, since I had already read three of Gay’s books and given each of them 5 stars, I headed out into the Harrikin, knowing full well that it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park on a sunny afternoon.
THE HARRIKIN
William Gay was quoted as saying, “I think writers have to have a touchstone. The rural landscape is mine. Sometimes I write scenes just to get to write a summer storm.”
The Harrikin is the one rural landscape that Gay returns to over and over in his stories. It is a remote wilderness of timbered hills and hollows that was once a prosperous mining area that had rich deposits of phosphate and iron ore, but the mines played out.
******
From the prologue:
There are some sorry sons of a bitches in this world, the fat man said, inadequately.
I believe about half of em are running wild in the Harrakin, Sandy said.
******
Most of the story is set in the Harrikin and it gives Gay the opportunity to describe that nightmarish landscape in hauntingly beautiful prose that makes it as important a character in the story as the humans mentioned in the prologue.
By the way, harrikin is the way the locals pronounced hurricane. The area was given that name after a tornado came through and with its terrible force twisted and uprooted trees making it an even more difficult area to traverse.
Yes, I know a tornado is not a hurricane, but folks said it made no difference; a powerful storm is a powerful storm no matter what it’s called.
I know; I didn’t understand the explanation either.
This is Gay, so the story is dark, but, thankfully, there is also humor as there is in his other books, humor that helps lighten the load.
******
“Think ‘No Country for Old Men’ by Cormac McCarthy and ‘Deliverance’ by James Dickey – then double the impact.” – Stephen King
******
Some writers ask us to suspend belief in order to accept the credibility of their stories. Flannery O’Connor, on the other hand, believed that they had it backwards. She thought that the reader should suspend disbelief and therefore believe that what she had written was something that could have happened no matter how grotesque or irrational it might have seemed.
William Gay agreed. He began his novel Twilight with a two-and-a-half page prologue, which could serve as a test case for the suspension of disbelief. (What follows comes from that prologue and since it is the first thing a reader reads, there is no need for a spoiler alert.)
On those pages he described a wagon hurtling its way into the Tennessee village of Ackerman’s Field. In its bed are five dead bodies that have obviously been murdered, and that’s just the first page. Also in the wagon is a dead dog, but not just any dead dog. This one’s ears have been pierced and a pair of cheap gaudy earrings has been inserted.
The people had been murdered in a wilderness area known by locals as the Harrikin. The driver of the wagon begins telling onlookers about other wild things that were occurring in that wilderness:
Old man Bookbinder got jumped by Granville Sutter and forced him down with a horse pistol. There’s a Tyler boy lost in there wanderin around with a rifle and some story about a dead sister and Fenton Breece misburyin dead folks. Turned up at my house two or three o’clock this morning half out of his head. Said we might ought to open some graves. I ain’t much for graverobbin but after this I’d believe most anything.
If I had not suspended disbelief I would have been through with this book after reading the prologue. However, since I had already read three of Gay’s books and given each of them 5 stars, I headed out into the Harrikin, knowing full well that it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park on a sunny afternoon.
THE HARRIKIN
William Gay was quoted as saying, “I think writers have to have a touchstone. The rural landscape is mine. Sometimes I write scenes just to get to write a summer storm.”
The Harrikin is the one rural landscape that Gay returns to over and over in his stories. It is a remote wilderness of timbered hills and hollows that was once a prosperous mining area that had rich deposits of phosphate and iron ore, but the mines played out.
When the mines closed and the railroad shut down the town died and the money quit the people left like the Maya abandoning their cities to build other cities and all that remained were the few families who’d refused to sell their land and itinerant squatters staking dubious claim to what no one else wanted and misanthropic misfits who felt some perverse kinship with this deserted, tortured land….
There were people here with no birth certificate to show they were alive, folks buried with no papers to show they were dead….
******
From the prologue:
There are some sorry sons of a bitches in this world, the fat man said, inadequately.
I believe about half of em are running wild in the Harrakin, Sandy said.
******
Most of the story is set in the Harrikin and it gives Gay the opportunity to describe that nightmarish landscape in hauntingly beautiful prose that makes it as important a character in the story as the humans mentioned in the prologue.
By the way, harrikin is the way the locals pronounced hurricane. The area was given that name after a tornado came through and with its terrible force twisted and uprooted trees making it an even more difficult area to traverse.
Yes, I know a tornado is not a hurricane, but folks said it made no difference; a powerful storm is a powerful storm no matter what it’s called.
I know; I didn’t understand the explanation either.
This is Gay, so the story is dark, but, thankfully, there is also humor as there is in his other books, humor that helps lighten the load.
******
“Think ‘No Country for Old Men’ by Cormac McCarthy and ‘Deliverance’ by James Dickey – then double the impact.” – Stephen King
******
October 2, 2015
Believe it. I am absolutely the worst thing that can ever happen to you.
This is a marvelous Southern-gothic fairy tale. (That doesn't mean it should be read to the kiddies at night, unless they didn't get enough of that kissing-a-dead-girl-necrophilia in Snow White.) A boy is lost in a deep, dark woods; a predator relentlessly tailing him. The youngster is helped by some almost mystical forest dwellers, yet the villain is tireless in his dogged pursuit.
Very little sunlight is allowed to filter through the trees in Gay's nasty little tale, but I couldn't stop turning the pages.
This is a marvelous Southern-gothic fairy tale. (That doesn't mean it should be read to the kiddies at night, unless they didn't get enough of that kissing-a-dead-girl-necrophilia in Snow White.) A boy is lost in a deep, dark woods; a predator relentlessly tailing him. The youngster is helped by some almost mystical forest dwellers, yet the villain is tireless in his dogged pursuit.
Very little sunlight is allowed to filter through the trees in Gay's nasty little tale, but I couldn't stop turning the pages.
January 24, 2014
On two occasions (that I can remember) I have casually dated girls who have worked as mortuary assistants. At the time the thought never really crossed my mind to ask them why they wanted to work around dead people, and in all honesty it didn’t seem to really be that big of a deal to me. Sure, I noted the fact, but in an offhand manner so that later, if I kept seeing this particular girl (which I didn’t, in either case, but for reasons not involving dead bodies) I could always ask her about it. It’s not like I wasn’t curious but I certainly wasn’t mortified (rimshot); however, I think this speaks to some bit of weirdness on my own part because most people seem to be made uneasy by the notion of a person working solely with the dead. Obviously, this repulsion comes from the fear of their own deaths; and in turn, I’d imagine people who pursue this trade have a fascination with that very fear, which, in my opinion, is a noble way to come to terms with that particular terminal slice of reality. [Insert Nietzsche quotes here.] But then again, if most undertakers were anything like Fenton Breece, I could definitely see why.
When Kenneth and Connie Tyler discover that they were scammed out of the burial arrangements they paid for their recently deceased father, they start to snooping and quickly find out that undertaker Fenton Breece is up to all kinds of ghoulishly-Dionysian antics with the local dead. A botched attempt at blackmail soon finds Kenneth Tyler on the run from Granville Sutter, a killer hired by Breece. As terrifying and badass as such a name would imply, Sutter pursues Tyler into the Harikin (pronounced like the word hurricane but in Tennessean hillbilly), a dense and desolate forested wasteland of abandoned mine shafts, dilapidated mansions, rusted machinery, and starving animals. As Tyler flees from Sutter, he’s helped and rejected by a rogue’s gallery of eccentrics living outside the confines of society and, for all intents and purposes, in the fading and rotting past. This dreamy and violent portion of the novel is the real meat of this book, depicting not only a tense chase but also an extended funeral dirge for a land and country that doesn’t exist anymore.
William Gay’s Twilight is a Southern Gothic novel that reads like a medieval morality play mixed with some surrealistic allegory worthy of any Brothers Grimm fairy tale, and written in an evocative style reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, which is to say, without the use of quotation marks. But Gay isn’t a hack imitating McCarthy—his metaphors and depictions of humanity aren’t as abysmally bleak as Cormac’s, and Gay has more of an inclination for depicting character’s thoughts and metaphysical fates with a flair of Romanticism-tinged metaphors.
This novel is a fanatstic read for fans of grim Southern fiction, and if ever I find myself again dating a girl who makes a living off the dead, now I know what to get her for a birthday present.
When Kenneth and Connie Tyler discover that they were scammed out of the burial arrangements they paid for their recently deceased father, they start to snooping and quickly find out that undertaker Fenton Breece is up to all kinds of ghoulishly-Dionysian antics with the local dead. A botched attempt at blackmail soon finds Kenneth Tyler on the run from Granville Sutter, a killer hired by Breece. As terrifying and badass as such a name would imply, Sutter pursues Tyler into the Harikin (pronounced like the word hurricane but in Tennessean hillbilly), a dense and desolate forested wasteland of abandoned mine shafts, dilapidated mansions, rusted machinery, and starving animals. As Tyler flees from Sutter, he’s helped and rejected by a rogue’s gallery of eccentrics living outside the confines of society and, for all intents and purposes, in the fading and rotting past. This dreamy and violent portion of the novel is the real meat of this book, depicting not only a tense chase but also an extended funeral dirge for a land and country that doesn’t exist anymore.
William Gay’s Twilight is a Southern Gothic novel that reads like a medieval morality play mixed with some surrealistic allegory worthy of any Brothers Grimm fairy tale, and written in an evocative style reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy, which is to say, without the use of quotation marks. But Gay isn’t a hack imitating McCarthy—his metaphors and depictions of humanity aren’t as abysmally bleak as Cormac’s, and Gay has more of an inclination for depicting character’s thoughts and metaphysical fates with a flair of Romanticism-tinged metaphors.
This novel is a fanatstic read for fans of grim Southern fiction, and if ever I find myself again dating a girl who makes a living off the dead, now I know what to get her for a birthday present.
July 19, 2014
God that was a Good Book! All my exuberance over in one shot and it deserves infinitely more. I can't find the energy to promote, I've reviewed too many fives and I'm worn thin. You see I've been abusing Goodreads and skimming the highest ratings off my To-Read list. Abusing it like good single-malt scotch, like five pounds of Godiva chocolate, like the best worst drugs. So just imagine me expounding volumes of praise.{imagine} A wonderful Ulysses like tale of being lost and hunted through the Harikin. A little of Gay's wonderful haunted woods,the Harikin,is revealed in each of his books and believe me, having once travelled there you will always want to return to it. This book had so many tangential side plots just imagining where those might have gone gave the book a rich and robust texture. mmmm... Chocolate and Scotch
July 21, 2017
From page 1 you're thinking this is a messed up book. Loved the book! You keep thinking how could it get any worse, oh, but it does. It's a can't put down type of book. Southern gothic at its best. Twisted!
Reread July 2017: Just as good the second time reading
Reread July 2017: Just as good the second time reading
December 31, 2023
This rather macabre story is a treat, especially the point of view of the kids as they confront with courage the terrors of humankind. The villains are subtly and skillfully developed. It's a page turner too, set in the south. Interested to see what Matt thinks.
November 2, 2016
This book was so dark I had to take long breaks from it. As such it took a month to read, despite being just over 200 pages. The writing is beautiful, the topic is dark dark dark. True southern gothic, and the imagined world of the Harrikin is apparently a repeated location in Gay's novels. I'm looking forward to reading more of him.
May 18, 2019
William Gay’s Twilight is unforgettable. If you like a story to be dark and twisted (oh, yeah!!!) then you can’t go wrong with this cat and mouse game.
Twilight is well paced and thrilling with
some really well created main characters. Unfortunately, the rest of them seemed too blurred in all that mist coming from the river. They all looked like the new ghost in the house. Who are you now, I kept asking.
Like with McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and I saw a lot of other similarities here, I’m not giving this five stars. Too many secondary characters (Far too many for a book with just over two hundred pages). I didn’t care about them. All those people along the way, you know? I didn’t believe them. I didn’t have enough time to know them. They became nuisances testing my patience. I just wanted more of that crazy undertaker.
Faces in the dark.
Words in the wind.
The same voice all of them.
The voice of the storyteller.
I really liked the ending. It made sense.
“All them folks in crazyhouses, old folk’s homes, cemeteries.”
Twilight is well paced and thrilling with
some really well created main characters. Unfortunately, the rest of them seemed too blurred in all that mist coming from the river. They all looked like the new ghost in the house. Who are you now, I kept asking.
Like with McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, and I saw a lot of other similarities here, I’m not giving this five stars. Too many secondary characters (Far too many for a book with just over two hundred pages). I didn’t care about them. All those people along the way, you know? I didn’t believe them. I didn’t have enough time to know them. They became nuisances testing my patience. I just wanted more of that crazy undertaker.
Faces in the dark.
Words in the wind.
The same voice all of them.
The voice of the storyteller.
I really liked the ending. It made sense.
“All them folks in crazyhouses, old folk’s homes, cemeteries.”
March 13, 2016
"He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside.” ~William Gay
Suspicious of an undertakers internment of their father, a brother and sister take it upon themselves to discover if he was buried properly or not. They find the answer to their question and a whole lot more. A crazed mortician and a career killer put on a chase in this Southern Gothic piece that gives Cormack McCarthey's No Country For Old Men a run for its money.
This is my first book by William Gay, but he may have found a fan.
November 24, 2014
Wonderfully written, creepy, dark but so atmospheric.
October 17, 2021
There is something about William Gay’s writing that totally speaks to me, but I can’t explain it very well. It is Southern Gothic poetry written with such authentic dialogue and such lifelong experience of the Tennessee hills and its unique people that I often reread lines and lines of his writing. But there is something else, some thing I can’t describe, some magic he works on me. Why was I so afraid for so long to read this novel? And even then waited for near Halloween as an “excuse” to pick it up finally?
‘Twilight’ is my third novel by William Gay and moves into second place, edging ‘The Long Home’ into third. ‘Provinces of Night’ remains a solid five-star read for me and an all-time favorite novel. This one missed the full mark only by a fraction because I felt it read a bit too much like a movie set at times. But the perfection of the psychosis of Granville Sutter and the madness of Fenton Breece and the resilience of Kenneth Tyler and the absolute hostility of the Harrikin round this up to five stars. Beware the Harrikin, folks, and stay shut of the likes of Granville Sutter and Fenton Breece. But embrace the old men and young Kenneth Tylers of this world. They deserve respect.
I leave you with some of William Gay’s memorable words instead of full quotes because the man loved words, as he mentions in the interview below: “putrescent,” “strobic,” “fecund,” “pheronomic,”“ululating,” “stygian,” “anomolaic,” “bewenned.” All I have left to read, besides his posthumously published work, is his short story collection. He left us way too early. 4.5 stars.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=V1L7AMjjE...
‘Twilight’ is my third novel by William Gay and moves into second place, edging ‘The Long Home’ into third. ‘Provinces of Night’ remains a solid five-star read for me and an all-time favorite novel. This one missed the full mark only by a fraction because I felt it read a bit too much like a movie set at times. But the perfection of the psychosis of Granville Sutter and the madness of Fenton Breece and the resilience of Kenneth Tyler and the absolute hostility of the Harrikin round this up to five stars. Beware the Harrikin, folks, and stay shut of the likes of Granville Sutter and Fenton Breece. But embrace the old men and young Kenneth Tylers of this world. They deserve respect.
I leave you with some of William Gay’s memorable words instead of full quotes because the man loved words, as he mentions in the interview below: “putrescent,” “strobic,” “fecund,” “pheronomic,”“ululating,” “stygian,” “anomolaic,” “bewenned.” All I have left to read, besides his posthumously published work, is his short story collection. He left us way too early. 4.5 stars.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=V1L7AMjjE...
July 18, 2017
This is an excellent story about an harrowing pursuit by a thoroughly evil and implacable foe through an impenetrable wilderness. It combines high tension and folksy humor and is at times reminiscent of scenes from the Blair Witch Project and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou.
William Gay's prose makes what, in most authors' hands, would be a simpe thriller, and turns it into a literary tour de force. I highly recommend it.
William Gay's prose makes what, in most authors' hands, would be a simpe thriller, and turns it into a literary tour de force. I highly recommend it.
December 10, 2017
Recommended by my Goodreads friend PirateSteve. Eek! So far it's about a deranged mortician who desecrates bodies before burying them!!
* * * * *
Whoo. Do not read this book if you are squeamish. I don't know that I've ever encountered such horrid, despicable characters. I was pleased with the ending, but it was a white-knuckled trip. Caveat emptor.
* * * * *
Whoo. Do not read this book if you are squeamish. I don't know that I've ever encountered such horrid, despicable characters. I was pleased with the ending, but it was a white-knuckled trip. Caveat emptor.
February 24, 2019
I have apparently just approach this book for the third time. Not quite sure what keeps bringing me back. But this time I realize that the book was mostly consumed with the chase of one man after another through the wilderness. It isn’t quite that the man represented good and evil. The one was certainly evil. And the book you had a collection of less than savory characters. There is some hope for the hero no I would not bet very much on him. This book is Still way too dark for me.
I first tried to read this book in October 2014. It is now May 2016 and I am listening to the book in the audible format. Probably for that reason I am getting further and then I did the last time and enjoying it more than the one star I gave it then. I Think I made it about a third of the way into the book then and stopped reading in disgust. I wrote the review that follows these comments. I think the book got a lot better after the first 40% where it begins part two. I'll let you know how it goes! Twilight boosted itself up one star in my second effort. I still thought it was mighty Grimm beyond necessity and couldn't quite grasp a decent moral to the story. The bad guys that bad ends and the young good guy just hitchhiked into the future. If my memory serves I may not read another William Gay book.
"Twilight” is my first William Gay and a rare read in the Horror genre for me. I am reading it because it is the October, 2014, Moderator’s Choice for the GR discussion group On the Southern Literary Trail. Halloween, you know? It was also available cheap on Kindle. I probably wouldn’t have selected it to read except all those factors came together! And I was feeling bold, brave, and willing to try something different.
The book is appropriately spooky with some verbiage that will catch your attention.
GR reviewers regularly refer to the influence of Cormac McCarthy on our author. I must go back and reread some of Cormac to understand this. I am barely wading in the deep McCarthy in my memory so the references are more titillating than illuminating. I hate it when I don’t get it! And Gay may be that kind of an author for me – some clearly wonderful prose that I suspect is saying more than I perceive. My mush brain needs help so I read reviews and search for clues. I find some at eNotes.com and insert them here to mull over as I read.
And now I crash and burn with this book!
OK, I am putting down Twilight to move on to something else. I made it a quarter of the way through the book and got past the nigger and the queer. (Well, that is the way some people talk.) But I get to the part where Tyler goes to the sheriff to report that Sutter is verbally threatening him and his sister. The sheriff says,
And then, as Tyler is leaving, the deputy allows as how he "Wouldn’t mind takin little sister a round myself."
There is a level of anti-black, anti-gay, anti-woman presentation that saps my ability to tolerate Twilight. The negative people vastly outnumber the positive. (If there are any positive later in the book!) No sense "worrying yourself to death about it." One star because I didn’t like it enough to finish it! It wore me out. Sorry, Mr. Gay.
Read on! Something else for me! Maybe some Annie Dillard. I feel better already.
I first tried to read this book in October 2014. It is now May 2016 and I am listening to the book in the audible format. Probably for that reason I am getting further and then I did the last time and enjoying it more than the one star I gave it then. I Think I made it about a third of the way into the book then and stopped reading in disgust. I wrote the review that follows these comments. I think the book got a lot better after the first 40% where it begins part two. I'll let you know how it goes! Twilight boosted itself up one star in my second effort. I still thought it was mighty Grimm beyond necessity and couldn't quite grasp a decent moral to the story. The bad guys that bad ends and the young good guy just hitchhiked into the future. If my memory serves I may not read another William Gay book.
"Twilight” is my first William Gay and a rare read in the Horror genre for me. I am reading it because it is the October, 2014, Moderator’s Choice for the GR discussion group On the Southern Literary Trail. Halloween, you know? It was also available cheap on Kindle. I probably wouldn’t have selected it to read except all those factors came together! And I was feeling bold, brave, and willing to try something different.
The book is appropriately spooky with some verbiage that will catch your attention.
Early in June of that year Lorene Conkle came out of the drugstore and Sutter was there the way she had known he would be. He was leant against a brick wall with a toothpick cocked up out of the corner of his mouth. When she walked past him, he unleant himself, elaborately casual, and followed her as if he’d been going that way all along and was just waiting for the notion to strike him.
GR reviewers regularly refer to the influence of Cormac McCarthy on our author. I must go back and reread some of Cormac to understand this. I am barely wading in the deep McCarthy in my memory so the references are more titillating than illuminating. I hate it when I don’t get it! And Gay may be that kind of an author for me – some clearly wonderful prose that I suspect is saying more than I perceive. My mush brain needs help so I read reviews and search for clues. I find some at eNotes.com and insert them here to mull over as I read.
Gay owes a stylistic debt to William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. Like McCarthy, his style at times tends toward the lush, dense, and baroque; however, Gay still manages to accurately depict southern and Appalachian idiom and speech.
Gay’s world of modern Appalachia is a stark world, where happiness is fleeting, and destruction and violence are always lurking just out of sight. The only way his characters can fight off the darkness around them is through their own integrity…..
The chaos that abounds in Gay’s world is even more insidious, however, in its ability to well up inside characters and turn them into their own enemies. …
Ultimately, Gay’s stories offer no answers, but they do demonstrate the importance of recognizing the happiness we do possess before it is lost.
Source: http://www.enotes.com/topics/hate-see...
And now I crash and burn with this book!
OK, I am putting down Twilight to move on to something else. I made it a quarter of the way through the book and got past the nigger and the queer. (Well, that is the way some people talk.) But I get to the part where Tyler goes to the sheriff to report that Sutter is verbally threatening him and his sister. The sheriff says,
Listen close to me, Tyler. I’m going to explain something to you. You’re young and you ain’t been around and you’ve got a lot to learn. You take a man wants something real bad and don’t get it, he’s likely to say some things he don’t mean. Sort of in the heat of the moment, you might say. When he cools down a bit, it’ll all be forgot. Likely he’s done forgot it, and you worrying yourself to death about it.
And then, as Tyler is leaving, the deputy allows as how he "Wouldn’t mind takin little sister a round myself."
There is a level of anti-black, anti-gay, anti-woman presentation that saps my ability to tolerate Twilight. The negative people vastly outnumber the positive. (If there are any positive later in the book!) No sense "worrying yourself to death about it." One star because I didn’t like it enough to finish it! It wore me out. Sorry, Mr. Gay.
Read on! Something else for me! Maybe some Annie Dillard. I feel better already.
August 14, 2022
Moose Tyler’s boy unearthed a perverted crime and is chased deep into the halfforgotten wilderness and hunted like a rabbit.
"A scope, he breathed. The son of a bitch has got a scope. My ass is gone."Gay's storytelling made me feel like I too was lost in the deep pineys: Who's talking to whom? No quotation marks. No chapters. Different narrators. Is that the character's first or last name? Is this a dream or a flashback? Where does one word stop and the next start? "Strawstrewn" "straightrazored" "cankeredpenny" "bedraggledlooking" "nightransfixed" ...
June 24, 2015
You know when somethin' bad happens, how folks kind of console one another? They say, well, it could of been worse. This or that could of happened. Well, not this time. Believe it. I am absolutely the worst thing that can happen to you.
If you are looking for a book to read this month of October and you're not really a horror type of reader, you might want to give this a try. No zombies, vampires, soul sucking demons or werewolves. On the other hand, if you are a horror lover, don't discount this book because it lacks the traditional tropes of horror. As we all know, horror can take many different forms and those real life type situations can be more terrifying, because, well you can see them happening.
In the very first chapter we watch as a young woman and a young "gangly" boy creep into a graveyard on a rainy evening......and proceed to dig up a new grave. Sounds like a pretty typical beginning to a horror story, right? You would be wrong.
We are introduced to Fenton Breece, the über creepy local undertaker.
Townfolk he met nodded formally to him. Sometimes if they were women who appealed to him in some way and whose death he anticipated with relish he'd tip the Stetson and watch their eyes skitter away to somewhere else and they'd hurriedly walk on.
A fierce anger perpetually ached in him but he'd learned to bank it. The living are capable of revenge the dead cannot exact.
So those two kids, Kenneth and Corrie, we saw early on became suspicious after the death of their father and decided to find out what the undertaker was really doing with the dead before and after burial.
He picked the photographs up carefully by their edges and replaced the rubber band and just sat holding them. What to do with them. These trading cards from beyond the river Styx, picture postcards mailed from Hell.
We then meet an even more despicable character, Granville Sutter who has the whole town under his violent thumb.
Something in Sutter's remote eyes told him that this was the knock on the door at midnight, the telegram slid under the door in the dead of night.
For years he'd felt madness sniffing his tracks like an unwanted dog he couldn't stay shut of. He'd kick it away and it would whimper and cower down spinelessly and he'd go on, but when he looked back over his shoulder it would be shambling toward him, watching him with wary apprehension but coming on anyway.
I could not turn away as these characters lives intersected in dark and violent ways; death, depravity and true horror that can only come from the acts of humans upon other humans. No need for the supernatural.
Highly recommended!
Thanks to my friends over at the Sounthern Lit club who introduced me to William Gay, never would have found him without you guys.
There's folks you just don't need. You're better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain't in it.
If you are looking for a book to read this month of October and you're not really a horror type of reader, you might want to give this a try. No zombies, vampires, soul sucking demons or werewolves. On the other hand, if you are a horror lover, don't discount this book because it lacks the traditional tropes of horror. As we all know, horror can take many different forms and those real life type situations can be more terrifying, because, well you can see them happening.
In the very first chapter we watch as a young woman and a young "gangly" boy creep into a graveyard on a rainy evening......and proceed to dig up a new grave. Sounds like a pretty typical beginning to a horror story, right? You would be wrong.
We are introduced to Fenton Breece, the über creepy local undertaker.
Townfolk he met nodded formally to him. Sometimes if they were women who appealed to him in some way and whose death he anticipated with relish he'd tip the Stetson and watch their eyes skitter away to somewhere else and they'd hurriedly walk on.
A fierce anger perpetually ached in him but he'd learned to bank it. The living are capable of revenge the dead cannot exact.
So those two kids, Kenneth and Corrie, we saw early on became suspicious after the death of their father and decided to find out what the undertaker was really doing with the dead before and after burial.
He picked the photographs up carefully by their edges and replaced the rubber band and just sat holding them. What to do with them. These trading cards from beyond the river Styx, picture postcards mailed from Hell.
We then meet an even more despicable character, Granville Sutter who has the whole town under his violent thumb.
Something in Sutter's remote eyes told him that this was the knock on the door at midnight, the telegram slid under the door in the dead of night.
For years he'd felt madness sniffing his tracks like an unwanted dog he couldn't stay shut of. He'd kick it away and it would whimper and cower down spinelessly and he'd go on, but when he looked back over his shoulder it would be shambling toward him, watching him with wary apprehension but coming on anyway.
I could not turn away as these characters lives intersected in dark and violent ways; death, depravity and true horror that can only come from the acts of humans upon other humans. No need for the supernatural.
Highly recommended!
Thanks to my friends over at the Sounthern Lit club who introduced me to William Gay, never would have found him without you guys.
There's folks you just don't need. You're better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain't in it.
December 22, 2018
Superb. I wonder if I had read this a few years ago that it would have made me appreciate (or more likely unappreciate) recent writing in the same genre.
It’s the first Gay I’ve read and clearly a classic in the Southern gothic genre.
The colloquial words used by the characters bring them to life. As they speak with each other they are sly and crooked, almost unwilling to state anything directly. The resulting deadpan humour is marvelous, the conversations bleakly funny.
For example,
As with the very best in genre Gay creates some truly evil villains.
Fenton Breece is one such, standing alongside those other memorable baddies,
Red Atkins in Woodrell’s Death Of a Sweet Mister
Joe Lon in Crews’s A Feast Of Snakes
Errol Childress in True Detective
Soldier and Angel in Lansdale’s Savage Season
It’s the first Gay I’ve read and clearly a classic in the Southern gothic genre.
The colloquial words used by the characters bring them to life. As they speak with each other they are sly and crooked, almost unwilling to state anything directly. The resulting deadpan humour is marvelous, the conversations bleakly funny.
For example,
You ain’t kin to old Moose Tyler, are you?
That’s what folks always called my daddy.
Claude laid aside his eating utensils and was staring at Tyler in parodic disbelief. Well I’ll be doubledipped in shit, he said. Why boy, I’ve held you on my knee a lot of times. Old Moose Tyler’s boy. You watch your mouth at table, Pearl said. Be baptized at a meetin and come straight home and talk that way at the supper table.
As with the very best in genre Gay creates some truly evil villains.
Fenton Breece is one such, standing alongside those other memorable baddies,
Red Atkins in Woodrell’s Death Of a Sweet Mister
Joe Lon in Crews’s A Feast Of Snakes
Errol Childress in True Detective
Soldier and Angel in Lansdale’s Savage Season
Displaying 1 - 30 of 422 reviews