Lori Keeton's Reviews > The Long Home

When it comes to Southern gothic, William Gay holds the title as the king of this gritty and unsettling genre. I do enjoy a good southern gothic read and was not disappointed with his debut novel, The Long Home. I was immediately taken with the exquisite prose that takes you by surprise. I expected dark, violent and roughly drawn, uncouth characters as well as the moonshine and murder but I didn’t expect to be so lured and captivated by such gorgeously yet awesome and awful portrayals of nature. William Gay has brilliantly figured out how to stun his readers by writing lines such as

Lightning flared silent and sourceless, eerily phosphorescent in the unreal green of the woods, and he quickened his steps, his movement stiff and jerky, a comic figure resurrected from an oldtime film.

The storm sometime in the night reversed its course or its brother passed for he woke in a lull of the rain, the air leaden and motionless and the night holding its breath. Then lightning came staccato and strobe, a sudden hush of dry flies and frogs, the walls of the attic imprinted with black images of the trees beyond the window, an instantaneous and profound transition into wall-less night as if the lightning had incinerated the walls or had scorched the delicate tracery of leaf and vine onto the wallpaper.

It was a lake of india ink, the dark water tending away to nothingness where lay no shoreline, no horizon, just the blueblack mist above it where his mind constructed miragelike images that were not there.

William Gay truly has a gift with language no matter what he is describing. He takes you by the shirt-collar and wrings you inside out with the way he gets to the heart of the character or the scene. He knows and understands the people of this rural Tennessee community because it was his own upbringing.

This novel takes place in a 1940’s rural and desolate community with an evil man, Dallis Hardin, who uses the insecurities and fears of others in order to hold sway over them. He’s a fan of liquor, bootlegging, bribery and extortion while passing blame to make himself more powerful. Young Nathan Winer has grown up without his father and no knowledge of what happened to him a decade ago. He inadvertently begins a carpentry job for Hardin and falls for the young Amber Rose who has been caught under the harsh influence of Hardin. The elderly man named William Tell Oliver, cautious and watchful, struggles with what he should do regarding what he knows about the disappearance of Nathan’s father. He must reconcile his mind and his actions.

In this good versus evil story, you will love or hate the realistically flawed characters some of them so selfish and full of pride and resentment. But the one thing you will completely fall in love with is the brilliant writing and epic storytelling of William Gay.