This is the book that opened up the world of quest novels to me, and was my gateway drug to Tolkien. Though I missed many of the subtle plays on words when I first read the book, reading it again as an adult made me love the novel all the more. Who cannot love a book that holds at its center the quest to restore Rhyme and Reason to the world.
Jessa, a journeyman taxidermist, tries to keep her family and the family business together after the suicide of her father. As quirky as a Florida police blotter on New Year’s Eve, this family take is funny, visceral, and heartwarming.
Set against the backdrop of a rural Georgia rattlesnake roundup, Crews has created a world as close to hell as can possibly be imagined for his main character Joe Lou Mackey, a man consumed by anger and spiraling downward. This is Southern Gothic literature at its most hardcore.
A poor Swedish immigrant is separated from his brother while trying to make it to California to find their fortune in the gold rush of the late 1840s. As the young man tries to get back to New York City, the last place he saw his brother, he instead finds a strange and dangerous 19th century America where circumstances lead him to get the reputation as a killer. An unconventional Western, where the moments of violence are more than offset by the novels moments of quiet and introspection.
I love a story with an everyman hero, and Miles Roby is just that everyman. A novel as much about a man and the troubles that beset him, including an unfaithful wife and a ne’er-do-well father, as about the place where he lives and the souls that make up Empire Falls. The writing is as easy to ingest as a cold beer on a hot summer day, and it is a wonderful mixture of the sad, funny, wistful, and heart-breaking events that make up so many of our lives.
A blend of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories and Deliverance. Two college buddies on a backwoods canoeing trip in Canada, save a woman who they find nearly beaten to death. Who did it, and can they elude them and stay ahead of a raging forest fire that threatens them in time to save the severely injured woman before she dies.