Twilight: A Novel
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
From the acclaimed author of Provinces of Night, a Southern gothic novel about an undertaker who won't let the dead rest. Suspecting that something is amiss with their father's burial, teenager Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie venture to his gravesite and make a horrific discovery: their father, a whiskey bootlegger, was not actually buried in the casket they bought for him. Worse, they learn that the undertaker, Fenton Breece, has been grotesquely violating the town's dead, enacting his perverse fantasies. Armed with incriminating photographs, Tyler becomes obsessed with bringing the perverse undertaker to justice. But first he must outrun Granville Sutter, a local strongman and convicted murderer hired by Fenton to destroy the evidence. What follows is an adventure through the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled roads, rusted machinery, and eccentric squatters-old men, witches, and families among them-who both shield and imperil Tyler as he runs for safety. With his poetic, haunting prose, William Gay rewrites the rules of the gothic fairytale while exploring the classic Southern themes of good and evil. About the author: William Gay lives in Hohenwald, Tennessee. He is the author of the novels The Long Home and Provinces of Night and the short story collection I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down.
Reviews with the most likes.
This was a book club pick. I quite enjoyed it. It's set in the '50s, and the premise, as the Goodreads blurb notes, involves desecration of dead bodies in a small Southern town, but most of it is about a protagonist's desperate flight to report it to someone who will listen before he's caught and killed. Not too much more I can say plotwise without venturing into spoiler territory.
Since I didn't care for the last book club pick, I was pretty stoked to have enjoyed this one. The writing is strong; the first sentence is pretty flowery, and while I enjoyed it, I was initially worried it would make the novel too hard to read, but Gay doesn't spend the entire novel dropping descriptors on you by the shovelful and it's perfectly readable.
