***I have been asked to add a spoiler alert for this review. I do not think it gives too much away, but am willing to add a disclaimer, so be aware that someone considers this review to contain spoilers. ***

This Southern Gothic novel set in rural Tennessee opens in 1932 with the murder of Nathan Winer by local bootlegger Dallas Hardin over the placement of a still on Winer’s land. Hardin hides the body, and the community believes Winer has simply left the area, which frequently occurred during the Great Depression. The rest of the book is set in the 1940’s as the murdered man’s son, also named Nathan, ends up working for Hardin as a carpenter. Nathan falls for Hardin’s “stepdaughter,” which is not well-received by the sleazy Hardin, as he has his own nefarious plans for her. William Tell Oliver, a reclusive neighbor, finds evidence of the murder, but does not act on it.

This book is dark in tone, with shadows lurking in every corner. The characters are well-drawn the writing is strong. The author describes the same scene from different characters’ perspectives, and it sometimes takes a while to figure out the perspective has shifted. It depicts life in a small town and there are long stretches where not much happens. People interact, disagree, fight, try to eke out a living, work (or not), and do all the normal things people do, with Hardin pulling many of the strings to get outcomes he desires. Dramatic tension is sustained through hints of vengeance coming, and the reader wonders if it will eventually occur or not.

It is relentlessly bleak, so it was difficult for me to greatly enjoy this book. I think it would have helped if there were a few more episodes that lightened the mood. Be prepared for graphic violence and explicit sex. There is a chilling scene toward the end, which is particularly well-written. Though I didn’t love this one, I didn’t dislike it, and would read another book by this author. ( )

Nathan Winer is a teenager in a small town in Kentucky, who's working the summer at a chicken farmers. He lives with his mother, a bitter woman made more bitter by what she thinks was her husband's abandonment; Nathan's not so sure. He likes to read, so right away I'm endeared to him.
Thomas Hovington is an old man, back bent and unable to straighten, lying in a bed in his house, where Dallas Hardin has moved in, taking over his wife, Pearl. He also has a daughter, Amber Rose, who Dallas has left alone, for now.
When three church women come to visit Hovington, they're sitting at his bedside, when Hardin calls Pearl out of the room. She excuses herself, and they hear:
"then voices, his mocking, conspiratorial, hers interrogative, faintly protesting, both made at once indecipherable and unmistakable through the thin walls, laughter vague and androgynous, and they all felt rather than heard the descension of flesh onto flesh, timeless, the protest of the bed springs, an involuntary gasp, sounds they seem to have possessed all their lives as inherent knowledge. Silence then save the whir of the fan tracking in its mechanical orbit and then, unbelievably, the creak of the bedsprings commencing in earnest, intensifying, attaining the desired rhythm. The front door opened and closed and they saw that the girl Amber Rose had gone out.
The women sat in a hot, aghast silence. Color crept into their faces, they did not look at each other but all stared at the dying man who seemed charged with the performance of something that might break the furious agony of silence, propel them onto whatever their next action might be. When he made no move the woman in the middle arose, perred at the wasted face. 'I believe brother Hovington's gone to sleep.' The other two arose with a thick rustling of silk, turned to the door. 'Poor soul. I expect he needs his rest.' The door pulled to when they crossed the porch and passed into the sun, Parasol's fluttering open, their foreshortened Shadows darting attendance like dark foel underfoot."

Thus we get a glimpse into the character of Dallas Hardin. And the spinelessness of Pearl. And the silent endurance of Amber Rose.
Hardin is a moonshiner; he runs a honky tonk out of his house, until he decides to build an addition where he can do more volume. Soldiers and sex workers and country boys keep him in business.
He employs Amber Rose as an ornament in his bar: men will pay him money to have Amber Rose sit with them while they drink at a table.
William Tell Oliver is an old man who lives down the road. From a ridge on his property, hidden by trees, he can see what goes on at Hovington's.
Motormouth Hodges, aka Clifford Hodges, was a boy when Oliver's pigpen was found with holes dug in it. Oliver covered them up, pondering the reason for it, and when he found them dug up again, he decided to watch from his barn one night. The boy came slipping into the pigpen with a shovel, and commenced to digging again.
When Oliver questioned him, bit by bit the story came out that his mother told him pigs came from holes dug in the ground in a pig pen.
" 'My mama did and I don't know what cause she'd have to lie.'
'I see,' Oliver said.
'I ast her where they come from and she said the old sow rooted them up in the hogpen.'
'and you not havin a hogpen... '
This is our introduction to "motormouth" Hodges. When we later meet him in the book, he is married to a woman who leaves him for one of the Blalock brothers. He is a friend of Nathan's.
In response to his cuckolding, motor mouth cuts the fence to the Blalock brothers' horse pasture. These horses are supposedly some fine "Morgan" horses.
A stallion and his two mares wander into Covington's property, and Hardin doesn't bother to tell anyone when he takes them in. He just has his worker build fence for a past year. Blalock finds out 3 weeks later takes his truck, sideboards put up, and heads over there. But we already know what Hardin's like, so we, the readers, are hardly surprised when Blalock finds himself stymied.
" 'you tearing my yard all to hell, Blalock. Ain't you had no raisin? I never heard you say could you cross it or kiss my ass or nothin.'
Blalock looked down from the driver's seat of the truck, his face tight and angry. He had been about halfmad all night anyway and he wanted his horses but an innate sense of caution had made him hope Hardin would still be asleep. By All odds he should have been after Saturday night but here was Hardin all wide awake and cleareyed at 6:00 of a Sunday morning, playing the country squire, smiling upon him despite the harshness of his words, a benign smile so transparently crafty it would not have deceived a child.
'I come after my horses.'
'can you prove they're yourn?'
'You know damn well I can.'
'I sort of thought you could. Get out awhile and we'll talk about it.'
he crossed over to the porch and stepped onto it. He hitched up his dress slacks and squatted not on the porch but on the heels of his shiny shoes.
'There ain't nothin to talk about. I come after em. Figure out what I owe for their keep and send me a bill.'
'whatever you say, you're the doctor. I guess we could dicker about it. I figure you owe me somethin in the neighborhood of $800.'
Suspecting some defect in his hearing, Blalock sought clarification. '$800? For what?'
Hardin arose and crossed the branch. Curiously birdlike, a graceless bird all joints and angles. Imprints of his shoulderblades through the thin yellow dress shirt he wore, morning Sun off a gold cufflink when he pointed across the stream.
'I had me a damn fine corn crop there and they done wiped me out before I knew they was on the place. They came in the night.'
Apoplectic with rage Blalock swung open the door and leaped out. He slammed the door so hard the truck rocked on its springs and he strode past Hardin and across the stream and up the Stony bank. Past the tilting dead cornstalks all he could see was Spanish nettles and sawbriars and great slabs of white limestone. He turned. Hardin was watching him amiably, a grin on his crooked face, hands pocketed and thumbs tucked in the loops of his trousers."

So the reader learns that Dallas Hardin does whatever he wants, just as he did with Thomas Hovington and his property and his family, and Blalock's Morgan horses. It's not the first time Hardin has talked about his great corn and bean crops, when all he ever had was a few dried out Bean Vines and cornstalks.
Hardin came by his attitude in a curious way, as the grocer Sam Long recalls, telling the story:
" 'anyway we got there and got the whiskey unloaded. Hardin took him a little drink and got to braggin. Spread hisself a little bit. That's when he said what I started out to tell you that was the damnedest thing I ever heard of. He said he was a walkin miracle, that nothin bad couldn't ever happen to him cuz the worst already had. He said he was a walkin Dead man.
'he told me he was born in a casket. Said his mama was killed when a horse run off with a buggy and throwed her out and broke her neck. They had her laid out and everything and was preachin her funeral, and and in a way I guess his too, when they heard a baby squallin. Folks didn't know what on Earth to do. Some just jumped up and took off runnin out of the church. Some of the women finally got up and looked. Godalmighty. He was down in her clothes. He'd crawled out or got Jarred out by them handling the casket or something. Anyway there he was.' "
Uh-HUH

Hardin offers Nathan Winer a job after Weiss, the chicken farmer's wife dies. He's so broken by her death, that he sells up everything and takes off.
Hardin knows that Nathan's father was a carpenter, so he figures Nathan has picked up some of the skills. Winer is working on the building when the drunks in Hardin's house get more riled up than usual:
"one afternoon he paused in nailing weatherboarding on the walls when a fight erupted inside and boiled out the back door, The old malen picking up their jars or jellyglasses or whatever and retreating to more neutral territory. Two soldiers were rolling in the yard and when a stringyheaded blonde broke a beer bottle over the top lmost one's head a girl with red hair and knocked her down with a 2x4 and fell upon her. Winer, watching their exposed white thighs and rent clothing, ultimately counted 18 participants and he wondered how they kept up with who was fighting whom and which side they were on.
They fought all over the backyard pulling hair and cursing and falling over one another. Winer swung himself onto the top plate the better not to be mistaken for a participant. Hardin tried to yell them down, then he and Wymer moved among them like dogs snapping at the heels of milling cattle, first with blackjacks then Hardin slipping on his Sunday knucks and wading in.
When they subsided no one seemed to know what the fight had been about and they all went back inside to discuss it save one soldier sitting crying in the grass with his jaw hanging crazy. He sat there awhile by himself and then he got up and hobbled around the corner like a very old man. Winer went on back to work and after awhile the old men came up from the branch laughing and seated themselves again."

Winer and Amber Rose end up getting together, and when Hardin finds out, he gives Nathan a Stern warning. Nathan doesn't heed it, endangering himself.

William Gay died way too young; perhaps he let a rough life. His character are some of the meanest you're likely to find in Southern Gothic but also creates characters like Nathan Winer and William Tell Oliver, endearing. Gay's writing is comic, cynical, and some of the most beautiful prose and he has a curious way of using two words as one and clopping off the g's in ing-words without using apostrophes. Well he does what he wants with the language and does it so lovingly.
The ending so sad. ( )

They must have invented the term “Southern Gothic” to define William Gay. This is my third of his novels, and I was pulled in and held by the throat through each of them. He can create evil characters that are frighteningly real. In fact, it is the reality of them that makes you shiver and wonder if the bolts on your door are fastened tightly enough at night.

The dark oppressed him. This dark house of stopped clocks and forfeit lives and seized machinery. Here in the watery telluric dark past and present intersected seamlessly and he saw how there was no true beginning or end and all things once done were done forever and went spreading outward faint and fainter and that the face of a young girl carried at once within it a bitter worn harridan and past that the satin-pillowed death’s head of the grave.

Nathan Winer’s father, also Nathan Winer, is said to have just walked off and left Nathan and his mother alone and struggling, but that is not what happened to him. He was killed in a very cold fashion by his neighbor, Dallas Hardin, a man without scruples and one who puts the fear of Satan in an entire community of people. This is not a spoiler, this happens in the first ten pages of the book.

The story that unfolds is about Nathan, the younger, Amber Rose, the daughter of the man whose property and wife Hardin has co-opted, and William Tell Oliver, another neighbor who knows more than he ever wanted to know about Hardin and his activities. What Gay recounts is a gritty tale of the hard-scrabble life of a poor Southern town, where bootlegging is the best source of income, the law can be bought, and minding your own business is about the only way to keep your body and soul intact.

In many ways, this is also a tale of isolation, of how fragile every bond is, how easily people pass through one another’s lives and how little impact they are able to have. How can there be so many who are always on the outside, peering in, divorced from any kind of love, or luck, or comfort?

And down the line. Past sleeping houses behind whose walls sleepers spun dreams he’d never know, let alone share. A thousand lives woven like threads in a patternless tapestry and if he died here on the highway it would alter the design not one iota. The world was locked doors, keep-out signs, guard dogs. He figured to just ease through unnoticed and be gone.

William Gay had a knack for writing of the worst, grittiest, least inviting places and people with the purest, smoothest, most lyrical use of language. He seemed to see through the mire and say, “there is clear water here, but you will have to dig deep to find it.” ( )

Earlier this year I read and reviewed another William Gay novel; Twilight and here I am with a second. I’m sad that he is dead and didn’t publish very much while he was alive because he’s become a favorite writer. Twilight is a denser novel prose-wise and also plot-wise. There’s more happening and the language is more layered in relating the story. That doesn’t make The Long Home a lesser book, however. I found its less dire plot and verbiage even more affecting. There is palpable menace delivered with powerful, but less hyperbolic language. A lot of the menace is felt by contrast with the quotidian, but harsh lives the characters lead and some positive things that occur between some of them. Overall it isn’t as grinding and bleak as Twilight and as a result is less cartoony and overblown. More realistic and believable.

In short, a bad man named Dallas Hardin rides into town and takes over another man’s house, wife, daughter and business. He then proceeds to hold the rest of the town in his clutches. There is no justice because they’ve all been bought. The citizens are too afraid to bring their own, so many of them are cheated, betrayed and murdered by Hardin. One of the main characters, William Tell Oliver, manages to stay out of Hardin’s orbit, but he watches others go down and his keen observation and emotional response is a much-needed break from Hardin’s villainy.

The other main character is Nathan Winer who after a lot of back story, does fall into Hardin’s orbit. He cannot see the twisted irony of the relationship or the sinister joy it brings Hardin, but Oliver does and so do you as the reader. It’s quietly heartbreaking. One of the posted descriptions I found for this book isn’t accurate and so the ultimate resolution is a surprise. It fits though given Oliver’s relationship to Winer. There were some other things I thought would happen, given Hardin’s character and relationships, but they didn’t so I remained fully engaged because I couldn’t predict any outcomes save one and even that wasn’t a guarantee.

If you haven’t read any William Gay and you like dark, gothic tales set in the rural southern US, give him a try. People say he’s a McCarthy rip-off, but since I haven’t read any McCarthy, I can’t say. I find Gay’s writing varied based on the two books I’ve read, but he shows a grasp of language that suits the story he needs to tell. I only wish there was more. ( )

Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, there’s a timelessness to William Gay’s writing in The Long Home. Gay writes about nature, good, and evil. Dallas Hardin is a bootlegger, thief, and murderer who represents evil. No one is pure in the story. William Tell Oliver comes close, an old man now who wishes he’d rid the earth of Hardin long ago. Nathan Winer is a young man tethered to Hardin by something that he may never comprehend.

Gay toggles between unadorned narrative and mystical lyricism, which comes when he’s describing nature. The earth is “coppercolored with fallen needles.” “Against the purple heavens the pinewoods turned oblique and foreign, took on the texture of flocked velvet.”

There are no easy lives in The Long Home. “The world was locked doors, keep-out signs, guard dogs.” Violence is rampant, “the fierce, sudden violence of summer storms.”

Gay mixes them all with mastery – nature, violence, human nature, evil and fortitude. ( )