Twilight

He felt remote, utterly alone. With the cool earth against his back he awoke sometime in his second night and he could feel the earth wheeling on its mitred course through eternity. Here the sky was clear and so strewn with stars there seemed no darkness between them but simply a vast phantasmagoria of light. Weak with hunger, he watched loom out of the night strange gaudy constellations like great wheels rolling toward him and turning endless in the void as if here in the Harrikin even the heavens were ancient and strange. They seemed to alter night to night as if the universe itself was still in flux. Once a shower of falling stars that seemed to have fallen prey to some celestial epidemic but instead of them showering around him he felt the pull of the earth fall away from his back and he became weightless, rising toward their streaking light like ofttold tales of souls raptured upward. ***** I don't know about you but, after reading a paragraph like that, I am pretty much committed to reading everything available by its author.

William Gay's book is excellent - more in spite of the story, than because of it. Gay's writing style is marvelous. He uses words and images that stop you in your tracks as you read the book. The story is about a pair of siblings who get mixed up with a perverted undertaker and a murderer hired to get incriminating evidence against the undertaker from the boy. The book is easy to read and can be read rather quickly, but I advise you to read it slowly and relish every word.

First of all - when you name a thing, it can somehow limit the scope of that thing. For instance, when William Gay's writing is labeled `Southern gothic' by reviewers, it's possible that a potential reader who has never particularly appreciated that genre might defer experiencing what could very well be a lifechanging literary experience. Know this: nobody writes like William Gay - and in the case of his work, it's more an instance of the genre being absolutely exploded by the expansiveness and reach of the art. In TWILIGHT, Gay lays out what in the hands of most other writers would be a simple tale of good-versus-evil. A brother and sister suspect that the local undertaker has cheated them in the burial of their father - a steel vault that should have surrounded his casket is, when they dig it up, missing. Following her hunches, Corrie Tyler convinces her brother Kenneth to join her in exhuming other deceased citizens of their rural Tennessee town - and what they find exceeds her wildest grim imaginings. The undertaker, one Fenton Breece, has apparently made a practice of desecrating - oftentimes obscenely - the bodies of the departed entrusted to his benevolent care. Corrie is determined that Breece should pay for what he did to their daddy - and Kenneth manages to purloin a bit of evidence - a bundle of...shall we say...incriminating photographs - from the trunk of the grim digger's car that the two believe should convince him to cough up a hearty (in the day) bit of cash, in reparation and punishment. Breece, however, disagrees - and while he consents to Corrie's proffered bargain, he has other plans in mind for the siblings. He enlists one Granville Sutter - a local convicted murder and all-around doer of evil deeds - to retrieve the evidence and silence the brother and sister. What ensues is a wild ride, both for the protagonists and the reader. Sutter is easily the most evil character that Gay has thus far created - and, I would venture, one of the vilest one is likely to come across in literature of any age. He thinks nothing of killing - be it man, woman, child or beast - and he does so on a semi-regular basis, whenever it seems to him that killing is required. He pursues Kenneth Tyler into, through and out of the Harrikin - an area of abandoned mines, concealed shafts offering a deadly drop to a quick end for the unsuspecting traveler, ghost towns, dilapidated shacks populated by some truly unique, unforgettable characters, abandoned mansions, and unfettered overgrowth that would stymie even the most seasoned woodsman. At one point, Kenneth muses that in the Harrikin even a compass would swing to some false true north of the wilderness' own devising. Many people - and farm animals - have wandered in and never come out. The situations and people that Kenneth encounters in his flight from Sutter and toward justice are not placed in the story on a whim - each incident, each meeting awakens something new in the boy, somethi

Described by the author as a modern-day "Hansel and Gretel", this riveting novel addresses the nature of good and evil, social facades stripped away in a plot that is both fearsome and beautifully written, the protagonists trapped in a bad dream peopled with goblins and ghosts, while a very human monster roams freely in a Gothic 1950's landscape. Fenton Breece, the local undertaker, has the look and demeanor of the otherworldly, giving off the scent of decay and dementia. Shunned by the townsfolk, Breece keeps to himself, his shameful secrets hidden behind crafty, scheming eyes. But when Kenneth and Corrie Tyler, two local teenagers, unearth their father's grave and find it filled with desecration, they extend their search to other sites, only to find them equally defiled by the horrors of a sick mind. Watching Breece's house, Kenneth takes advantage of an opportunity to steal a briefcase that contains no money, but a trove of incriminating evidence against the vile undertaker. Thinking to take advantage of this sudden windfall, Corrie sets a plan in motion by which brother and sister can extort money from Breece. In their naiveté, neither realizes the Pandora's Box they have opened until misery arrives in the person of Granville Sutter, a stone killer charged to retrieve the booty and a generous reward for his efforts. Thus plays out a stunning nightmare, as picturesque as it is terrifying, where true evil stalks the land, Kenneth Tyler gone to ground along with the evidence in the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled brush and vegetation, the very place a symbol for ill luck. While Breece slides further into the moral morass of his delusions, Sutter tracks Kenneth Tyler through the Harrikin, seemingly prescient, ever but one step behind Tyler, savoring the taste of the kill, terrorizing any brave spirits who help the boy. Set against nature's bountiful chaos, hunter and prey wend through their macabre dance with only the stars and beasts for audience. Like the so-called Preacher in "Night of the Hunter", Sutter stalks his innocent victim, Tyler sure he carries "the seed of some dread plague that would lay waste all before him so that folks... fled into the woods with doors left ajar." Stunning, haunting and primal, Gay has fashioned a luckless pair, retelling a fable laced with the hopelessness of despair and senseless violence. The genius is in the prose, images as striking and memorable as the theme, fate looming in the final clash, where only good or evil will be victorious. Luan Gaines/2006.

The bad news, overall, is that William Gay is getting on in life and that we have to wait a couple of years between his books--and that his first book was in 1999. The good news is that he's a superb writer and even if he stumbles slightly, as with Twilight, you still get magnificent storytelling. The story takes place in deeply rural Middle Tennessee in the early 1950's and features 3 main characters: 1) Kenneth Tyler, son of a moonshiner, about 15 years old, whose father has died and who Tyler suspects (for reasons that are not as clear as perhaps they should be) was not buried properly--so he digs up the body. 2) Fenton Breece, the undertaker, who has some very kinky passions. 3) Granville Sutter, the town bully and killer, who Breece hires after Tyler steals some incriminating photographs. The interaction between Tyler and Sutter is wonderfully drawn--Sutter is much better at outdoor skills: "A hellhound on my trail" as Tyler describes him. Indeed, Sutter seems to be able to track Tyler through the rough back country with ease--like most of Gay's works, there's almost a supernatural element here. The Breece character is not as well drawn--he's not dark and dangerous like Sutter, or like the unforgettable Dallas Hardin, who gives a sense of pervasive brooding evil to Gay's excellent "The Long Home". Breece is strange, unpleasant, and you don't really get inside him, as you can with Gay's other characters. You are not in the city here or in Gay's other novels. The Law is an uncertain thing, and it remains uncertain in many of Tennessee's deeply rural areas to this day. There is a darkness in Gay's works--much like Cormac McCarthy's novel Child of God (Gay's novel Provinces of Night takes its title from that McCarthy novel). Fifty years ago I read Robert Penn Warren's The Cave, with an ominous cave opening on the cover of the paperback. I'm a Tennessee caver, but that cave opening on the book cover has stuck with me all these years--it conveyed a sense of darkness, of uncertainty, a place where you had to go even though you would much rather not go there at all. William Gay's novels give me just the same sense of foreboding, of menace. Twilight is a fine novel--just don't take it to read on a rural camping trip!