When she moved through the forest, she was surrounded by friends. In the fall, they drove their nutrients down into the earth, anchoring themselves to survive the hard winter months. In the summer, the plants spent their energy producing leaves and flowers and fruits. The teas and tinctures, potions and poultices. “This was the best time of year for root-hunting, digging up the raw ingredients for the medicines she made.
The problem becomes exacerbated by the abundance of florid prose, leaving readers impatient for the story to take shape: There are plenty of events, but they often feel anecdotal or, as in the case of an early scene where Rory hitches a ride with a truck-driving aesthete, extraneous. Tonight they had other remedies: jars of white whiskey secreted between their knees, their faces jolly-red in the October dark.”īut with so much to set up - there are also rival bootleggers, corrupt local sheriffs, federal revenuers, and a sect of Pentecostal snake-handlers (ministered to by a pastor with the on-the-nose surname of Adderholt) - the plot is slow to develop. To hear it told, they lived on Double-Cola and Goody’s Headache Powder from the dope wagons, wheeled pushcarts that circulated the mill, peddling sugary cakes and sodas and tonics. “They were pale and soft-looking, with sickly creases underneath their eyes, like they lived underground.
The characters and settings are rendered with mesmerizing detail: Stoking his smoldering anger is the matter of his mother, confined to a mental hospital since the unsolved attack that left her mute and her paramour - Rory’s father - dead.īrown’s prose is vivid and full of imagery. Rory is aimless, having “come home with war in his blood.” He struggles with his new wooden leg, a handicap that limits his employment options, but has managed to train himself to drive Maybelline, a souped-up 1940 Ford coupe fitted with an ambulance engine, along the tangled maze of dirt roads and side paths that creep up the mountain like kudzu. Her mountain witch remedies put her in a place of wary reverence according to the upstanding population of nearby valley town Gumtree. Watching over Rory is Granny May, his foul-mouthed, herb-smoking, fiercely independent grandmother. Set in the rugged mountains of western North Carolina in the early 1950s, the story opens with 22-year-old Rory Docherty, a wounded veteran of the Korean War, embarking on his new career as a moonshine runner for fearsome kingpin Eustace Uptree. In Brown’s third novel, Gods of Howl Mountain, he shows a similar reverence for authenticity, packing his pages full of regional aphorisms and period-specific detail. In fact, the shot is the real McCoy, an authentic tintype taken with a 19th-century camera and imprinted on a thin metal plate.
The author photo on Taylor Brown’s website appears yellowed and frayed around the edges, as if treated with an “Old West” Instagram filter.
0 kommentar(er)
