Fugitives of the Heart

by William Gay

In this, William Gay’s last posthumous novel, we have his homage to Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Marion Yates, a teenage orphan, is befriended by Black Crowe. Yates in turn nurses Crowe through a work explosion and the two form a seemingly lasting friendship. First love, racism, and betrayal—these are all topped with Gay’s signature wry humor in his signature Tennessee fictional setting of the Hurrikan. Gay again proves himself a master of prose.

Genres: Novels, Southern Gothic, Fiction, Southern

240 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2021

About the author

William 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.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

'In the last windblown days of Indian summer he had nowhere to be nor any soul in all the world to answer to. Day long he might sit on the slope above the house where he once had lived and watch the pale under sides of the silver maple leaves run like quicksilver in the windy light and he had a thought for the encumbrances of freedom and for the childhood he'd willingly cast aside and could not retrieve...'

Fugitives of the Heart, published posthumously, is the second novel I've read by William Gay, the other being his very impressive debut, The Long Home.
This is the coming-of-age story of 15 year old Marion Yates in Depression era rural Tennessee. It's a tough, hardscrabble existence for the young lad, his father dead, his mother a part-time prostitute, but he is too busy just hanging on to feel sorry for himself.
This is Gay's homage to Mark Twain, his own take on Huck Finn. Yates is a boy who befriends a black man named Crowe, comes to live with a widow lady and later lives in a cave. Sound familiar? There's even a scene where the widow lady reads Huckleberry Finn aloud to Yates and he can't get enough of it:
'He was hopelessly snared by Twain, forced to seek out the book in surreptitious moments during the day, finishing the book far ahead of her...' and: ' it's the greatest novel an American ever wrote, she tells him. She thinks awhile. Or any other nationality, she added'

And so the narrative progresses by a series of self-contained vignettes- encounters with the motley assortment of locals in the area. He has a feud with an old lady bootlegger named Granny Stovall who lives above the MuleDick Saloon ( gotta love it) which escalates when he falls in love (or something like it) with her granddaughter. There are darkly comic encounters when he hops on a train to attend a circus and later with a drunk who delivers ice. His first time in a church. (hilarious )
The story or plot here, in this instance, is thin. In fact, there really isn't one. It is a snapshot of time and place. But the thing that will keep me coming back for more of William Gay is his prose. Lush, descriptive, darkly poetic - it is to be slowly read and savored like Tennessee sippin' whiskey.
Gay himself, cited Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy as his influences and indeed, McCarthy's style echoes distinctly, but still Gay has put his own brand on his style of Southern Literature - in his own way, in his own voice.

A mad dog summer maligns the heart. Tempers frayed and friends fell out and there was a fatal cutting on the evening shift at the crusher. Rumors of madness and hydrophobia , of things unchained to prowl the night, beasts that locked on to your spoor and tracked you as tireless as fates. Husbands and wives took to eyeing each other speculatively across the supper table and going to bed in uneasy silence...

I am so very glad to have found the writings of William Gay and count myself fortunate that there is more of his work yet to discover. A shame he is gone.

[Cheri · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the foreword by Sonny Brewer, he mentions a piece that William Gay wrote, published in his Don’t Quit Your Day Job published by Brewer, his thoughts on becoming a writer:

’I had no words for the way the snow looked drifting down in the streetlights and I wanted those words. If they were anywhere I would find them.’

This is the second book by Gay that I’ve read, the first being The Lost Country which was published in July, 2018, six years after his death. His writing, to me, has an essence of Cormac McCarthy’s darker settings and stories, with the writing of Wendell Berry, the almost reverential observations of nature and settings. The essence of the love of these small towns set in the middle of nowhere, inhabited by those struggling with life in these hollers, and the ne’er-do-wells that seem either drawn there, or stuck there, as well as those who take advantage of their circumstances.

This is a relatively short read, but I wanted to savor it, reading and re-reading passages, just letting them soak in. So many that were beautiful in their simplicity and their appreciation of all that is found in our physical world, or his descriptions of these impoverished, troubled and troublesome members of this community in Tennessee.

Both a coming-of-age tale of a young orphan, Marion Yates, and the trial of finding one’s way in this world, there’s a subtle humour in this story. Gay’s depictions of these people that inhabit these places, their mishaps and their faults, are imbued with a gentle humour, but there is also a sense of gratitude and love, as though this were written as an ode to the love he’d found in these places, himself.

With themes of love and friendship, along with adversity, corruption, and poverty, Fugitives of the Heart also shares a sense of reverence for this one chance we are given to appreciate and embrace this adventure we call life.


Published: 30 Jun 2021

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama

#FugitivesoftheHeart #NetGalley

[Liam O'Leary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video Review

Other than his sense of humor he had no saving graces, he was a drunk and he was lazy. He was drunk only when he could get whiskey but he was lazy all the time. He had a job breaking ore in the mine, but a fifty-pound sledgehammer grows ever heavier when the morrow is as bleak as today, and ultimately he turned to stealing and that was his undoing.
—Book 1: Allen Creek (2nd paragraph)

I cannot overstate this enough — this is an incredibly good book. This is the best ARC I've read to date. I want this to be very clear, because typically posthumous publications can be dismissed as : "oh it's just a B-side; it's just unpublished notes for diehard fans; these are early works from when the author couldn't write very well"

In many cases these impressions may be accurate, but not here. This is a fully-fledged story.

I have never read William Gay before; I am British; I am fond and familiar with Southern Gothic as a genre. So, while there are very few reviews available at the time of this review, due to its limited availability, I'm here to weigh in with the other ARC reviewers that this is 4*+ level.

Fugitives of the Heart is the story of (Marion) Yates, a young boy growing up in extreme poverty in the old South. It reminded me very much of 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy and 'Narcissus & Goldmund' by Hermann Hesse, in that it shows a (young) man maturing through a meandering adventure through a vast and cruel landscape. The narrative wanders more than some stories as it chronicles the survival and journey of Yates from a terrible beginning. There are some very funny and very odd scenes in this book that make it a memorable and varied reading experience. These sentences are very punchy. The description of the setting is incredible. No words are wasted here.

I cannot 5* this book only because it will not be for everyone, in its vulgarity and subversiveness, but it retains a humanity and profundity that most mature readers will appreciate. To be more explicit, the book has some scenes many would find perverse relating to nudity, sex, violence, urination... But, these odd scenes are always done with a humanity, a message, a good sense of context, and some dark humour which makes it enjoyable to read. If you're at all familiar with what William Gay's most acclaimed work, Twilight, is known for, then these scenes won't be surprising!

It's very, very quotable and I had to struggle not to give too much away in my GoodReads status updates. The Afterword states this is not William Gay's 'Southern Gothic' novel (Twilight), but rather, this is William Gay's homage to Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn', which was influential to his early writing. This is William Gay's 'Adventure Novel'. As William Gay was published very late in life, it is sad this story was not published sooner. It will be very much right at home with all the Cormac McCarthy fans still waiting for an update on The Passenger!!

This is my 11th advanced reader copy (ARC) review. This means I received this ebook for free, and read it on my old Amazon Kindle, in exchange for this review which I have also published on Netgalley. I'm not financially motivated, as I read library books, so I only read ARCs I actually think will be good enough for me to rate and review honestly.

---[initial thoughts]---
Better than expected. Strongly recommended for Cormac McCarthy fans.

It has recently been published, but is still not yet widely available.

ARC Review coming soon.

[Still · Rating 5 out of 5]

At this time, I can barely write a review that would do justice to this powerful if slim send-up of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn.

The novel is bookended by a foreword by Sonny Brewer and a postscript by J. M. White that add much to the mix of joy and immense sadness that marks the life & literary career of the great William Gay.

I’ll have to approach this later with less emotional turmoil and a clearer-eyed view of the brilliance of the narrative encountered.

Time done gone won’t be no more.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a posthumous novel, a soft of mashup between Thomas Wolfe or Mark Twain. William Gay died back in 2012, and it has been the writing that was discovered since then that has put him on the map. This book is the very moving story of growing up in Tennessee in the 40s (thus why it has a Look Homeward, Angel feel to it and the boyhood initiation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). The text is quite beautiful and a real pleasure to read. It has been mentioned as a possible Pulitzer winner, sort of like A Confederacy of Dunces I think. I am not convinced that it merits displacing some of my other favorites, but if you like reading about growing up in the dysfunctional, racist South and trying to come out of it whole and open-minded, and you are a fan of Wolfe, then this book is for you!

My list of Pulitzer candidates for 2022 - come and make your vote!

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fugitives of the Heart is the last posthumous novel of William Gay. Gay, who passed away in 2012, remarkably did not have his writing published until well into his fifties, and is one to seek out.

The works of William Gay are best enjoyed when slowly mulled over and allowed to unfold at their own pace, like a closed morning flower opening its petals to the light of day. The more time allowed for his words and sentences to bloom, the more nuances and pleasures his writing will reveal.

Often, in his paragraphs and even in his longer sentences, the meaning of the entire passage may not be fully realized until coming to the last words. While to some this may seem troublesome, once a reader unlocks the mystery to the cadence of Gay’s writing—which does not take too long and may require just a small amount of patience—his descriptive powers and storytelling methods become clear, with readers soon being richly rewarded with the created imagery of his prose.

Fugitives of the Heart, an homage to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, is a coming-of-age tale of fifteen-year-old Marion Yates in rural, poverty-stricken Tennessee. In the novel, Gay depicts the growth and travels of Yates as he navigates through the complexities of the world filled with those that put more stock in the rearing and pedigree of people, rather than character and possibilities.

The novel opens with Yates as a small child who quickly learns of the need to rely mostly upon himself after witnessing the brutal aftermath of his father brought home after being caught poaching from a nearby farmer.

From then on, Yates roams the area learning the best he can from his own experiences and others in the area during the 1940s. Along the way, he develops a friendship with a black man named Crowe. Crowe, with a mysterious background of his own, seems unencumbered by the racial opinions of those around him and takes an interest in the young, but wiser than his age, Yates. Soon, as their relationship develops and with his own dangerous background slowly revealed, Crowe becomes a mentor to the Yates teen.

As the novel unfolds, Yates finds himself drawn to the woods and tends to spend much more time away from his home than residing with his some-time prostitute mother, all the while continuing his friendship with Crowe. His interest in the opposite gender also starts to emerge, only to seemingly create further problems for the teen. Yates continues to scratch out a life in search of meaning and purpose, especially as he finds too often people, even those you trust, are capable of betrayal and harm.

The writing in Fugitives of the Heart as with Gay’s other offerings, and like so many other Southern writers, is wonderfully descriptive and often so in diminutive locution. With his blending of words, Gay is so capable of describing everyday occurrences, such as voices along the riverbank, in such creative and unique ways, allowing the reader to think of such events in ways never before thought of.

Fugitives of the Heart is highly recommended to those fond of Southern writers and Southern noir.

This book was provided by NetGalley with the promise of a fair review.

This review was originally published at MysteryandSuspense.com

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting novel. The writing is atmospheric and the characters well drawn. Yates is a teenage boy, witnesses his fathers death and his mother is sick. Set in the late 40s in Tennessee, Yates befriends a black man, Crowe and looks after him after a mining accident. Darkly humorous and unusual.

[Janisse Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is classic William Gay, even if it was published posthumously. What I don't understand is WHY he didn't publish all these manuscripts himself. Why would he just stash them up in his attic? It just doesn't make sense, but then there was a lot about William that didn't make sense. I read this book in two days, which is how I read when I really love the writing. And I LOVE William Gay's writing. I always have, ever since I read his first book. The guy is a real writer, the real deal, a writer's writer. When I dwell too long on these thoughts, I feel pity for most writers at work today, because almost none of them will ever come close to the big guys. William loved Faulkner. Also McCarthy. I think if he'd had a little more money, a little less worry & poverty, and a little less addiction, he would be one of the greats. (In my eyes, he is one. And why this isn't universally known, I don't know. Instead, we're all asked to read pure junk.) Anyway, I hope William Gay is resting in peace & I hope he's all good with this book.

[Chris Via]

Review forthcoming in Rain Taxi Review of Books.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Posthumous novel by one of the premier Southern Gothic Literary Gods of all time. That I was asked by the publisher to read this advance copy of a recently discovered MS will stand out as one of the high honors of my life. I plan to pen a formal review for publication but let it be said that this is a beautiful book by any standard. It owes a definite debt to Huckleberry Finn in all the right ways.

There's a reason Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy love William Gay. Set in rural TN in the 1940s, this book is lyrical, scary, daring and funny. Reading it was a stone-cold pleasure. Every page burns with genius and love.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my opinion this last novel of William’s equals his Twilight and Little Sister Death.

[Dawn Major · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fugitives of the Heart was found in the attic of a hand-built house where William Gay raised his kids. I had the opportunity to assist editing this lost work and am so pleased fans of Gay will finally have the chance to read his last novel, Fugitives of the Heart, which is being published this summer, by Livingston Press, University of West Alabama. It’s full of what fans of Gay love about his prose—his dark poetic language and supernatural imagery, the town of Ackerman’s Field, his haunted forest, the Harrikin, as well as the roughnecks that often reside in his narratives.

Young protagonist Marian Yates doesn’t have much of a chance with the parents he’s been allotted in life. His dad is killed for poaching and his mom is an ailing prostitute and is anything but maternal. She eventually departs the world, leaving Yates orphaned and homeless in rural Tennessee. Yates is a sneakthief, a scavenger, a wanderer, but he’s also a deep thinker and attuned to nature. He’s more at home in the Harrikin than in a warm bed with a roof over his head. Yates loves Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was Gay’s inspiration for this novel. He spends a short time with the Widow Paiton, who introduces him to Twain. Yates, so compelled by the Twain’s words and the adventures, he sneaks in during the day, devouring chapters that had been denied him at night: he read about “Jim and Huck in the flux on the sun-rimpled Mississippi. He could almost smell the hot torpor of the river, seeing the country sliding past, until he was hopelessly snared by Twain.” These passages truly make you see Yates for the innocent he is, despite being thrown into a den of wolves.

Yates’s prized possession is a pocketknife that his friend Black Crowe helped him acquire from Dow Cook’s general store. This negotiation is the inciting incident. Gay followed Anton Chekhov’s theory—essentially, if you write a gun into the first act of a play, it must be fired in the second act. Of course, in Fugitives of the Heart the gun is replaced with a pocketknife. Yates is in love with a girl out of his league who has a bootlegging granny who despises him. Every day is an adventure from hopping box cars heading to Ackerman’s Field to catch the circus, sneaking under the cover of night to beat up the antagonist, Swain, who’s been visiting his mother’s bed, surviving a road trip with a mad iceman (some will recognize the short story, “The Iceman,” which is part of this novel), to saving Black Crowe from a lynch mob and ultimately facing one of life’s toughest lessons—betrayal.

Fugitives of the Heart has all the favorite settings that fans of Gay will recognize. The novel is set in Allen’s Creek, a failing mining town, more rural and backwoods than the small town of Ackerman’s Field, which feels like a city to Yates. But Allen’s Creek has everything Yates needs: Dow Cook’s General where men gather to sip whiskey and play cards, and the Muledick Saloon—the name says it all—where Yate’s love interest, Cassie resides. Yates discovers a cave while wandering the Harrikin, and the dark imagery Gay captures here is the darkest yet in his entire body of work. To give you a sample, here is passage from when Yates is inside the cave:

The dark seemed an unreckonable enormity as if this lightless and watery firmament was an antiworld of perpetual night couched below a world hollowed and filled with water, a globe fissured and striated with hairline cracks that threatened to inundate him, to drown him in a black and soundless tidal surge down these inkblack corridors to he knew not where.

Reading this passage, I am reminded of the poet and songwriter, Leonard Cohen, and his song, “You Want It Darker?” Gay’s prose often reminds me of poetry or lyrics, though—a word magician in his own right.

Gay’s classic archetypal characters—the orphan, the villain, the explorer, the sage, the maiden—are present in the novel. Gay turns Jungian archetypes upside down and inside out. Case in point, Black Crowe, starts out as the caregiver and teacher to Yates, but when survival mode kicks in at the end, Crowe quickly turns into a villain and trickster, betraying the one person who had his back.

Fugitives of the Heart is somewhat reminiscent of Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. It has a similar rural Tennessee setting, and both protagonists live in underground caves and are rejected by society. The similarity ends there though; Yates is no murderer or necrophiliac. Yates’s soul may tetter on the edge of damnation, but ultimately, he has compassion for his fellow humanity and the creatures of the Earth and practices a type of homegrown earth-based religion. There’s an innocence that remains in Yates even when he sinks to his lowest points in life, literally and figuratively.

Gay was an episodic writer, which works well with Fugitives of the Heart—a quintessential coming-of-age novel like its inspiration, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Since Twain’s novel reverberated with Yates, it’s not a stretch to imagine Yates viewing himself as Huck and Black Crowe as Jim. Yates doesn’t travel down a river; instead he journeys through the Harrikin and around Allen’s Creek and Ackerman’s Field for the Mississippi River. Interestingly, Gay sets the Tennessee River in the town of Ackerman’s Field. This is unusual, and readers of Gay’s works may be surprised to find the Tennessee River flowing through Ackerman’s Field. Perhaps, Gay did this to mirror Yates’s adventures with Huck Finn’s adventures—a nod to Mark Twain.

Some readers still may find Gay’s narrative leaps jarring. Episodic writers tend to write a series of scenes that are self-contained. Most of Gay’s protagonists are young males or males on the brink of adulthood who seek out adventure and find themselves in predicaments. Stylistically, this is the method Gay has used with all his writing when the main character is a young man. Writing a series of events, experiences, adventures, mayhem, strange occurrences, even instances of boredom episodically makes sense for Gay’s male protagonist and especially for a young Yates who undergoes early trauma and from there must negotiate life with almost zero guidance. It’s easy to imagine that a teenager who is living hand to mouth lives in the moment. Yates doesn’t consider the future; he doesn’t think much beyond his immediate survival or pleasure and comfort. So, narrative leaps are actually more attune to how a young man in this world would think and operate.

If you are a speculative fiction reader, Fugitives of the Heart, like all of Gay’s works, has its ghosts and witches. Gay was known to genre-bend and wrote one horror novel, Little Sister Death, but all his works contain an undercurrent of magic. It’s not full fantasy, but without a doubt reality is distorted with the appearance of ghosts and characters you would find in dark fairytales. Old Granny Stovall is described as a witch and her child as “some dread troll or dwarf.” The witch is an archetypal character in Gay’s fiction. Kenneth Tyler from Gay’s novel Twilight encounters a granny wife while traversing the Harrikin. Granny wives were midwives and spiritual healers who practiced herbalism and foraging and were the closest thing to medical care in Appalachia where hospitals were far away and largely distrusted. Gay has spoken and written about his Uncle Scott, who was famous for having the gift of second sight. It’s not surprising that Gay’s characters in Fugitives of the Heart are superstitious, and though generally Christians, still held on to remnants of Scottish and Irish folk magic and Native American beliefs.

Aside from the main narrative, the introduction was written by Sonny Brewer, a fellow writer and a friend of Gay’s, and the postscript was written by the lead archivist, J. M. White. Locating and assembling Gay’s written works and paintings has been an act of love completed by friends and family who understand the importance of his work and strive to keep his name present. The image on the cover of Fugitives of the Heart—an image Gay painted—is of a dilapidated barn and is indicative of many of the images Gay painted and captured in his prose. Gay was an avid painter and hoped to use his paintings as the image for his covers, but some of the larger publishers didn’t go for that. It’s been the mission of the current team working to publish and advocate for Gay to also ensure his images make it in onto his book covers. In addition to getting some stunning prose, readers will also get a piece of Gay’s artwork with this novel.

As a fiction writer, Gay plunges into the darkest corners of the human condition. His words take your breath away. The die-hard fans of Gay can tell you their favorite passages and quotes because his words stick with you; they haunt you. And Fugitives of the Heart will stick with you, too, long after you’ve put the book down.

[Robert McKean · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dark, deeply lyrical and disturbing novel from an uncategorizable writer. The William Gay paint may be thought of as mixture from William Faulkner’s, Cormac McCarthy’s, Thomas Wolfe’s, and Samuel Clemens’ paint cans, as well as pinches from Sophocles’ and Aeschylus’ tubes, but the resultant hue will be like that of no other writer. Fugitives of the Heart, a posthumous manuscript published by Livingston Press, seems to take off from Huckleberry Finn without the softening required by Clemens’ Nineteenth Century readers. But the Tennessee mountain boy Yates who finds himself orphaned among swindlers, bootleggers, and prostitutes navigates a dystopian southern landscape nearly as bleak as McCarthy’s The Road. As Yates tries and tries to make sense of his depraved and misbegotten fellow creatures we soon realize that there is no way of reckoning lives gone this far astray. They are who they are, and a thinking, feeling, questioning young man will never live comfortably within it, will never be allowed to live within it. Yates can’t figure his life out because it cannot be figured out. There is only death or escape.

[Clay Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread this book and it’s even better the second time. Gay is like a poet with his brilliant prose.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of William Gay, and after this read, I will certainly look up his other works. All of the comparisons to Faulkner and McCarthy and the recognition of Fugitives of the Heart as an homage to Huckleberry Finn have been well covered. The prose is descriptive and poetic, interspersed with episodes of dark humor and “a few stretchers,” as Gay described them.

Fugitives is the last of the posthumous novels to be published. Its life before publication and its discovery are covered in the Foreward by Sonny Brewer. A Postscript by J.M. White gives a critical analysis of the work’s place in Gay’s canon. One wonders if the book was complete in Gay’s view, or if it was still in process. There seems to be an abrupt shift into the climactic episode. Whether this was intended to stand as it is or some transitioning would have been added could be debated.

Overall, I am pleased with my introduction to William Gay’s work and have a bit of regret that I did not encounter it earlier, perhaps while he was still alive and writing. Thank you to the editorial team, Livingston Press, and NetGalley for an Advance Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Clay Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very strong novel by William Gay. Very much reads like his earlier work. Excellent job by the editors keeping this as close to his voice as possible.

[Kendrick Prewitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Gay’s posthumous novel, Fugitives of the Heart, just published, features a 15-year-old boy, Hayes, growing up in 1940’s rural Tennessee. This episodic novel has thematic and stylistic roots in the fiction of Twain, Faulkner, and McCarthy, as some have noted, in its violence, humor, obscurity, and lyricism.

Hayes befriends Crowe, a Black former schoolteacher who buys him a pocketknife in the general store and later tutors him, after which Hayes repays the favor by nursing him through a mining injury. Readers will notice a Huck and Jim relationship developing, and Twain’s novel is specifically invoked later, though Gay complicates and darkens that pairing in certain ways.

The novel follows Hayes, the central consciousness, through several coming-of-age passages, following the death of his father (who was shot for stealing a side of meat) in the first chapter. Hayes lives alone by his wits and by periodic raids of neighboring chicken coops, gets in fights, sleeps in a cave, has furtive adventures in adolescent sex, takes a hilarious trip to the circus to see its “morphodite” and gets showered with hippo piss, and tumbles through the ceiling of his foster mother’s bathroom. There is violence as well, with lyrically rendered housefires and gunshots: e.g. “the room went electrically bright and in the shotgun’s concussion she was blown backward through the door she’d so soundlessly closed in a summer storm of blood and shattered wood and a sudden windswept silence that felt like a shout” (203).

Gay elevates the novel from its episodic structure—one adventure after another, one violent death after another—with lyricism and dark humor, and with suggestions of the force of nature on the characters. Towards the close of the novel, the narrator relates, “The heat and the unceasing noise of the crusher and the bewildering succession of days, one the same as the other, settled in the hollows like a plague.” (202). Gay, in a postscript, allows that the novel “came to him” while he was visiting the remains of an old town near where he lived, and wrote it “to hush those voices.”

Enjoyed it so much I read it twice. Highly Recommended!

[J.C. White · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Gay has long been one of my favorite Southern writers, and Fugitives of the Heart reminds me why. Even as a posthumous release, this is no afterthought or collection of scraps, it is a fully realized novel that carries all the hallmarks of Gay’s dark lyricism, his gift for landscape, and his uncanny ear for the Southern voice.

The story follows Marion Yates, a boy of fifteen growing up in Depression-era Tennessee, where survival is more instinct than choice. His mother drifts between neglect and prostitution, his father is gone, and Yates is left to carve meaning from a cruel, often absurd world. Along the way he encounters Crowe, a Black man who becomes a friend, a widow who offers him shelter, and a colorful assortment of locals ranging from ice-wagon drunks to bootleggers perched over saloons. These vignettes build less into a traditional plot than into a rough-hewn tapestry of a time and place, echoing Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as much as it does McCarthy’s The Road.

Gay’s prose, as always, is what keeps me turning the pages. His sentences are dense with imagery yet unpretentious, as though the ridges and hollows themselves are speaking. He captures both the grotesque and the tender with equal conviction: violence, vulgarity, odd humor, and the small, surprising mercies of humanity. This is Southern Gothic, yes, but also Gay’s own homage to Twain—an “adventure novel” painted in darker hues.

It isn’t perfect. The narrative can feel thin or meandering, and its subversive touches, nudity, violence, the rougher edges of boyhood, won’t be to everyone’s taste. But for readers who admire Gay’s other works (The Long Home, Twilight), or for anyone who appreciates the raw beauty of Faulkner and McCarthy, Fugitives of the Heart is a powerful addition to the canon.

That Gay died in 2012 and left behind treasures like this only deepens the sense of loss. Yet how fortunate we are to have another window into his imagination, another chance to walk with his characters through a Tennessee landscape haunted by poverty, cruelty, and, above all, the stubborn spark of human spirit.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fugitives of the Heart is the last of William Gay’s posthumous, stolen novels. You can read the story about that in the introduction by Sonny Brewer, a welcome addition to the lit on Gay.

At base, Fugitives is a coming-of-age story. Marion Yates is fifteen-year-old, the fatherless son of a part-time prostitute in the hills of the deep South. Though mired in poverty, Yates has has other things on his mind: that pocketknife in the general store, that girl who came to stay above the Muledick Saloon, seeing that big cat at the circus. He becomes friends with a black man named Crowe and cares for him after a mining accident. The two develop a wary relationship.

Enough has been written about Fugitives as an homage to Huckleberry Finn, so I’ll let readers find that elsewhere. Gay’s writing here is exactly what you’ve come to expect. His lyrical descriptions of nature and decadence remain unmatched. Marion accepts the facts of a world overpopulated with scavengers, bootleggers, dissemblers, and villains while trying his best to find a way forward, out of this depressing landscape, to something of a future. It’s not pretty, but it’s really fantastic.

As a minor complaint: it’s complex to criticize a book posthumously edited and published. Depending on the personnel involved, they may have been reticent to make any but the most obvious edits, or made wholesale changes depending on their relationship and experience with the author. I think there was a bit of redundancy early in the novel that might have been better smoothed out, but I don’t know if this was a hands-off editorial approach to the existing manuscript, or the felt need to pad the already thin novel.

Overall, Fugitives of the Heart is darkly funny, occasionally bawdy, frequently threatening, and unsentimentally thoughtful; an welcome addition to Gay’s body of work.

[Jon Sokol · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full Review at https://jonsokol.com/blog/

Like most of Gay’s novels, "Fugitives of the Heart" takes place in mid-20th century, rural Tennessee. The fictional setting is one that was familiar to the author who grew up in a time and place that lagged behind much of the rest of the country in its efforts to shed the horrors of the Great Depression and gives the story a kind of post-apocalyptic vibe.

The protagonist, Marion Yates, is a half-wild teenager who is coming to age in the 1940s in a deteriorating mining community. With an outlaw father who is murdered for trying to steal food for the family and a prostitute mother dying of tuberculosis, Yates is forced to fend for himself. With a Huck Finn-like passion for freedom and distain for civilized society, the boy rambles through both wilderness and what passes as civilization in a series of adventures which are at times both heartbreaking and darkly comedic.

Similar to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the episodic plot is held together with the main storyline concerning the relationship between the boy, Yates, and a free-spirited black man on the run named Crowe. However, while Twain certainly haunts this novel, Fugitives is not a retelling of a classic. The dark mood, the themes, the lyricism is classic William Gay storytelling.

[Dave N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gay's posthumous work continues to outshine his earlier books (though perhaps not his short stories, which are superb) and Fugitives of the Heart is no exception. The allusions to Huckleberry Finn didn't hit me while I was reading the book, but the afterward made them clear. Gay has always been great about writing younger characters, and especially those leaning towards the wayward and lost, but Marion Yates might be my favorite to date.
The story lags at times, but usually each section has a purpose that helps pull the narrative along. I do wish some of them had been fleshed out a bit more because I think they could have hit harder as a result of some more backstory, but the main plot winds up beautifully (and devastatingly), so I really can't complain. I just can't believe this might be the last new novel I ever read from William Gay.

[Daniel Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

It pains me to rate less than 4 or 5 anything with William Gay's name on it. In Fugitives of the Heart, his Southern Gothic voice resonates in many excellent passages but not overall, or even mostly, IMO. His two-page synopsis is at the back of the book. It seems unfulfilled.

Little doubt his close and capable literary friends did the best possible reconstructions of his uncompleted projects. A tub in his attic was filled with yellow legal pads in his longhand. From a mishmash, they sorted and patched. The result of their diligence is that this novel and three others, plus two collections of short stories, are posthumous publications.

The Foreword by Sonny Brewer, Gay's close friend, and the Postscript by Michael White, one of Gay's publishers, are excellent.

Footnote: Gay considered William Faulkner's The Hamlet the perfect novel, and he saw Faulkner's "formula" in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, and he used it too.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the last books by William Gay that had yet to read. Like everything else I have read from this craftsman this just oozes brilliance. Few authors mastered the use of words to create a deep, lasting sensation of being there anywhere near as well as William Gay. A true master of storytelling, character development, and atmosphere. Said to be his homage to Twain, I will take his estate at its word as I have never read Twain, though I have read 'Finn' by Jon Clinch. Again, not Twain, but a backstory of a character in Twain's novel. Anyway. Gay's books are a treasure trove of awesomeness and I am sad he is no longer alive, as his talent was legion.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the last major work from the archives of the Author, William Gay. He died in 2012. This particular Novel is the result of a small group of his friends having gotten together to bring the Author's previously unpublished works into print. William Gay was a true Southern writer who hailed from Hohenwald, Tennessee. His prose is akin to that of Falkner, McCarthy and Twain who were among his favorite authors. The narrative is a bit unusual and takes a bit getting use to but is really delightful in its intensity and depth. A very entertaining read.

[Guy Salvidge · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the fourth and final posthumous William Gay novel, exceeding the three that were published during the author's lifetime. This is clearly an apprentice work and without much in the way of narrative arc, but there's plenty to like here nonetheless. I'm looking forward to a posthumous story collection later this year. Presumably that will be it from a very talented writer who's been dead ten years already.

[Dr. Jon Pirtle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have not quite completed reading every piece of Gay's work that is published. However, the prose in this dark brooding book is as powerful as the enduring earth and heartache and sky about which Gay writes. I thought Gay's novel 'Twilight' was powerful and demonstrated his deftness with words but 'Fugitives of the Heart' surpassed even 'Twilight' in the familiar terrain of grottos, mist-covered fields, windfalls in the limestone hills, and underneath gunmetal skies. Superb craftsmanship by Gay in this sad tale of betrayal and solitude.

[LeastTorque · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel from the posthumous batch was a very fast read. It’s not my favorite by Mr. Gay, who is one of my most favorite authors, as it’s less lyrical than other works. Whether that’s because it wasn’t finished by his hand or because this was his Twain homage, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter, it’s still William Gay and still great.

[Cara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently I was missing out on Southern lit greatness and now need to go read more William Gay. Lyrically, haunting and laced with the complicated nuances of southern fiction, I thoroughly enjoyed this novella (and notes!).

[Maridith Geuder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant writer. Poetic prose.

[Ben Gibbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars.
I can't wait to read more Gay!