Items related to The Long Home
A hole opens up in the Tennessee hills stinking of brimstone, and dark harbinger of a deeper mystery and evil in the blood-and-bone character of Dallas Hardin who might be the devil himself with only young Nathan Winer to stand against him, the very man who murdered his father. The first Nathan Winer is murdered by Dallas Hardin and years later the son, also Nathan Winer, unwittingly finds himself working for Hardin. Worse, the boy is falling in love with the daughter of another man killed by Hardin on his path to set up a staging ground for all manner of corruption and toxic enterprise. The Long Home is a Southern Gothic portrayal of the classic battle between good and evil, and the extraordinary debut novel of William Gay (1941-2012).
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Review:
In Willam Gay's debut novel, The Long Home, the devil comes to Tennessee in the form of one Dallas Hardin, a vile and violent man who brings tragedy in his wake. Set in the backwoods South of the 1940s, Gay's tale is populated with a colorful array of types familiar to readers of William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and other practitioners of that particular brand of larger-than-life literature that seems to thrive south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Though the types might be familiar, Gay does an impressive job of making them his own, each with his or her distinctive, fully human qualities that transcend the roles they play as bootlegger, town drunk, or even hero.
About the Author:
The story opens when Dallas Hardin ("Old Nick," according to one character--"or whatever he's goin' by now") comes to town and wrests away home, wife, and whiskey still from the seriously ill Thomas Hovington. Only in a Southern novel could such an event be preceded by the inexplicable opening of a brimstone-scented pit near the victim's house without the reader even blinking an eye. Enter young Nathan Winer, hired by Hardin to build a honky-tonk. Winer starts out thinking he can earn his wage while steering clear of his employer's evil ways, but it soon becomes apparent that he can't--especially after he falls in love with Tom Hovington's daughter, now Hardin's stepdaughter, Amber Rose. Having given his heart, Nathan has taken the first inexorable step towards a final, deadly confrontation with the devil.
If Gay's themes are big--nothing less than the battle between good and evil--and his metaphors drawn unabashedly from that old-time religion, his novel is nonetheless firmly grounded in the flesh-and-bone world--sometimes nightmarishly so. There is a lot of blood spilt over the course of this novel, in myriad ways and in graphic detail. Indeed, one quality that The Long Home shares with most of Cormac McCarthy's work is that it is definitely not for the faint-hearted. But Gay balances the horror with moments of true beauty, and his novel is undeniably compelling. Enjoy it for its many strengths and for its promise of a bright literary future --Sheila Bright
William Gay was born and raised in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Equipped with literary skills and language craftsmanship gained only from reading and hours of writing thousands of longhand pages no college, no writing classes Gay rose to become, in the words of Stephen King, ...an American treasure laboring in obscurity in the hills of Tennessee. Often compared to Cormac McCarthy, William Gay, while by no means a household name, through three novels, collections of short stories and essays, and two movies (so far) adapted from his work, is now counted among the great Southern writers he admired so much Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O Conner, and others. Willliam Gay passed away at his home in March 2012.
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- PublisherMacAdam/Cage
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 1596923865
- ISBN 13 9781596923867
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages256
- Rating
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