Synopsis
Full of the intensity and vibrance of Appalachian speech, a tale set in rural West Virginia vividly captures the violence of a backwoodsman and drug lord named Tannhauser and the innocence of a young man named Goody. A first novel. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo.
Reviews
In this taut, muscular thriller set in contemporary rural West Virginia, short-story writer Benedict ( The Wrecking Yard ) hurtles the reader toward a chillingly apocalyptic climax replete with high-tech weaponry and old-fashioned treachery. Peopled with an assortment of New South grotesques, the story centers on Goody, a young bare-fisted fighter new to the neighborhood, and Tannhauser, a deranged, 12-fingered backwoods drug lord with a penchant for sadism. They and a host of other odd, not to say perverse, characters are memorably portrayed, due in large part to Benedict's deft use of multiple points of view. The down-at-the-heels atmosphere of the backwoods South is also convincing; the region's tattered history reposes in the land, and the characters both literally and figuratively stumble through it, bumbling onto an overgrown confederate cemetery, an eerie abandoned resort and subterranean, prehistoric chambers as they move toward their inevitable appointment with destiny. Benedict portrays Goody's loss of innocence and painful acquisition of wisdom in prose laced with Appalachian figures of speech, the down-home rhythms of ridge-runner dialect and an undercurrent of menacing violence. A few of the plot elements seem contrived (all dispensable characters neatly kill each other off), and the fates of several compelling characters are left up in the air, but by and large this is an ambitious and skillful literary thriller, not to mention a rip-roaring read. Major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The first novel by storywriter Benedict (Town Smokes, 1987; The Wrecking Yard, 1992) barely resembles his measured and lyrical short fiction. Benedict owes more here to action movies than to any literary source: the levels of violence and the plot improbabilities have the same nihilistic drive of a Peckinpah film. In Benedict's West Virginia, the smell of death pervades the air, and wild dogs and boars rule the uninhabited forest. Government land, long abandoned, now serves the local druglords, who import South American laborers to harvest their best cash crop: marijuana. Into this corrupt mountain community stumbles Goody, a good but troubled barefisted boxer who once killed a man in a dirty match. Goody's sleazy old landlord sets up a match with the henchman of the biggest drug czar, Tannhauser, himself a homicidal lunatic with bizarre theories about interplanetary travel. Meanwhile, Tannhauser is having all sorts of problems in his bizarre backwoods empire. Two mysterious gunrunners have arrived with a huge arms shipment only to discover that Tannhauser's latest crop failed. A DEA agent has alerted the police that they're on to Tannhauser's dealings. And the cops, in turn, are thoroughly corrupt, so they plan to take no prisoners in their raid on Tannhauser's encampment--a bloodbath no one survives. Except Goody, who made the mistake of winning his match and was brought to Tannhauser's in order to be tortured to death. Instead, during the surreal conflagration, Goody falls into a sinkhole and begins his final passage through the legendary West Virginian caves. And this wild journey serves as his literal and figural salvation. Too many of Benedict's oddball secondary characters are drawn too broadly--and disappear with a stroke. Which is particularly annoying in a novel that nevertheless manages to suck you into its wild intrigue. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
In this first novel, Benedict continues his exploration of rural West Virginia life begun in his two short story collections, The Wrecking Yard ( LJ 1/91) and Town Smokes ( LJ 5/15/87). As in the short stories, the writing here is strong and vivid. The wide cast of characters includes Goody (a boxer), Dwight (a tourist guide), drug enforcement agents, marijuana growers, gunrunners, illegal immigrants, and a variety of lost and corrupt souls. They live and die in an atmosphere of bleakness and despair, with violence and brutality as constant companions. The novel begins slowly, but, once the characters come together, the action is nonstop (and none of it pleasant). Benedict's style and themes may be easier to digest in short story format, but there is no denying the book's gut-wrenching power. Buy this for fans of the early novels of Cormac McCarthy and Benedict's earlier books.
- Nancy Pearl, Director, Washington Ctr. for the Book at the Seattle P. L.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Somewhere in rural West Virginia is El Dorado, at various times a resort hotel, a Civil War hospital, and a World War II POW camp. Now it's the headquarters of Tannhauser, a ruthless drug dealer. Caught in Tannhauser's orbit are gunrunners, Mexican illegals, and DEA agents, not to mention a number of eccentric and/or corrupt locals, including Sheriff Faktor; Goody, an ex-boxer; Dwight, a tour guide at the Hidden World Caves; and a hermit referred to only as "the anchorite." Violence is the rule in the world these people inhabit, and it permeates every aspect of this isolated place. Goody's rented house is haunted by a husband's brutal murder of his wife; the corpse of a man who died while exploring the caves is preserved for tourists to see; and boars go wild with fear and slaughter each other during a thunderstorm. Benedict, who lives in West Virginia, is the author of two highly regarded short story collections, Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard. In this, his first novel, individual chapters have the compression of short stories, but he fails to maintain a novel-length narrative flow, and none of his characters sustain interest for the book's 300-plus pages. Still, his language is vivid and assured, his dialogue is skillfully written and convincing, and he creates an atmosphere of unsettling strangeness. Mary Ellen Quinn
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