After digging up a few graves, Corrie and Tyler deduce that the local mortician, Fenton Breece, has an evil bent with the dead after he receives them. They also steal his briefcase which contains photographic proof of his dark practice. Breece hires the town killer to hunt them down and retrieve the proof before they can deliver it to a respectable lawman. Tyler heads for the backcountry to evade the killer, and ends up on an Odyssean journey, meeting up with a Greek chorus of characters only rivaled in form by those Cormac McCarthy might produce.

Gay's deft and poetic touch with the world around us is elegiac. Some reviewers bemoan his grammatical style - I doubt they'd have the same quibbles with Faulkner or McCarthy. It's another symptom of just how overlooked [[William Gay]] is in the world. There are few living writers with his delicate and cutting touch with a story.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended. ( )

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. ( )

Got halfway through the book when I quit. The story was OK and the writing is very good, but dammit if I don't hate the arrogance of a writer who thinks it's OK to thwart standard punctuation rules and do away with quotation marks. I can't tell you how many times I had to re-read a paragraph because it was made up of dialogue, narration, then dialogue again. But of course, that wasn't obvious because there were no quotation marks. His scant use of commas was frustrating too.

Also, Gay seems to enjoy putting words together to make a new word. "Cartire" is an example of this. I first read the word as "car" "ti" "ree" before I realized he meant car tire. And this wasn't being used in dialogue to illustrate someone speaking quickly. It was just there as a part of exposition. Aggravating.

All that said, the guy absolutely nails Southern dialect. And the core of the story might have been more impactful if it had moved at a bit quicker pace. But I suppose Gay so badly wants to be in the "literature" genre that he's got to add all this other imagery and fluff so as to slow down the plot. ( )

So beautiful, I will forgive the lack of punctuation. ( )

I’m abandoning this because the author has abandoned punctuation.


I picked up "Twilight" in the expectation of sitting down for some Southern Gothic horror. Set in 1950s Tennessee, it tells the story of a teen brother and sister trying to get revenge on an undertaker who secretly does unthinkable things to the bodies he buries.


The kids have discovered this by digging up the graves and taking photographs of the desecrated bodies they find inside the coffin. The twisted things the undertaker has done are described in detail.desacrated


Perhaps I should have found that horrifying. I didn't, It's interesting as a story premise but not horrifying.


The thing that horrified me, that made me put the book aside because I couldn't take it any more was... the deliberate removal of punctuation that identifies direct speech.


Why would anyone do that?


Is it meant to add something?


Does it liberate me from the tyranny of textual clarity?


Is it a fashion? Please tell me it's not a fashion. Gay was sixty-five when this was published. Isn't that old enough to be fashion-free?


Here's an extract to show you what I mean. The ebook is published with a one-character indent to mark a new paragraph and with no lines between paragraphs. The result is a conversation between two people that looks like this:


Because it all balanced out. Because I knew something that he didn’t know.
What?
I knew he was going to die and I’d still be alive.
She was silent for a time studying him. She shook her head. You’ve got a hell of a way of looking at things, she finally said. But let’s get back to Fenton Breece. I’ve been thinking about this, and I know how to make him pay where it’ll hurt him the worst. In the pocketbook. How long have you been thinking about this?


This looks like vandalism of the text to me. Not to mention being a lot more difficult to figure out what is going on. I've decided life's too short. I'm abandoning this and reading something else