I loved this book, the way it begins with an event, and an horrific one at that, and then explores the way that affects the locals of the area. Some have complained that it is too disjointed, with each chapter told from a different personality's point of view, but I didn't feel that way. I feel it encapsulated the atmosphere of the town, and provided tacit commentary, and rightly examines the way the things that happen around us can affect aspects of a person's life. ( )

Way too dark... ( )

This book is written in chapters, like most books, however each chapter is told from the point of view of one person in the town. Each chapter-sub-story lets us look into the lives of these people and as we read along we begin to see how the stories intertwine into the history of a place. You often hear about how in small towns everyone knows everyone else, well this is why that is.

Twisted Tree is a beautifully written book about the bonds between people and the places they come from. It starts out with a murder and in some ways there is some mystery behind who would have done the murder itself, but the story goes well beyond that. It is just as possible that by the end of the book you have forgotten to wonder who killed the people on the highway, because you have become so caught up in the lives of the others who knew them that you simply became a part of the town. ( )

Each chapter in this novel could almost be read as a stand-alone short story. The characters are peripherally inter-related, but each is dealing with their own sense of loss and despair. They are linked together by the town of Twisted Tree, South Dakota and by the death of one Twisted Tree inhabitant, Hayley Jo Zimmerman.

Hayley Jo was murdered by a serial killer who stalked anorexics online, befriending them under false identities. After he gained their trust and confidence, he would find them where they worked or lived, kidnap them, and then murder them. The reader learns of Hayley Jo’s demise in the first chapter which is told in the third person but from the killer’s perspective. As Meyers exposes the killer’s madness bit by bit through his disjointed thoughts, it creates a level of creepiness and anxiety that merely hints at the portending evil in store for Hayley Jo.

The following chapters highlight one or two characters in Twisted Tree with some characters appearing in multiple chapters showing how they are connected. Each character has been impacted by the death of Hayley Jo, regardless of how well they knew her. In addition, the death of Hayley Jo resonates within each characters own life experience. Meyers is a gifted writer with a knack for making an understated impact.

Southwest South Dakota may be a long way from Ohio, but as far as I can tell TWISTED TREE is just above WINESBURG. I read the latter book when I was in grad school back in 1969. I remember being mildy interested in this classic collection of interrelated stories of a small town in Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, and probably even had to write a paper about it. While I may not have been wildly enthusiastic about the book, it still stands as a kind of standard for that particular kind of book - small town life as depicted by interconnected detailed word portraits of certain of its citizens. There have certainly been countless variations on this theme in the several decades since Winesburg, Ohio was published. One of the most recent successes was Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, OLIVE KITTERIDGE, a book that caught me up. And now I've found TWISTED TREE, Kent Meyers' mesmerizing literary look at a small town in South Dakota, the same town that appeared in his earlier work, The Work of Wolves.

The unifying element here is the brutal rape and murder of Hayley Jo Zimmerman, a young woman from TWISTED TREE. The murderer is a serial killer who victimizes anorexics he finds and 'meets' online. My telling you this is not a spoiler. The murderer is introduced in the first chapter and is perhaps one of the creepiest characters whose head you'll ever get inside of. Reading that first section brought to mind The Silence of the Lambs. I also thought of Frederick Busch's disturbing beautiful novel, GIRLS. And yet Hayley Jo and her murderer are not really central characters. Meyers uses this luridly violent crime only as a catalyst to introduce and develop dozens of other characters you will not soon forget, the victim's family, friends and fellow townspeople. Gradually the secret lives of all these people are revealed, in ways that will keep you turning pages as fast as you can read. Marriages unravel, religion and faith fail, lives fall apart.

There is one particular set of characters, Brock and Angela Morrison, which gave me particular pause. Angela is a city girl who has a difficult time adjusting to the plain and lonely life of a rancher's wife. But Brock is an extremely patient and kind man. I thought of Carson and Rebecca, characters from Meyers' earlier novel, The Work of Wolves, speculating that yes, this is how it might have been for them had that plot line been carried through. Here Angela drifts into an affair with the Catholic priest in town. That same priest, Father Caleb, figures in his own chapter later in the book - a surreal encounter at the scene of a rainswept roadside auto accident. The faith he thought he had lost forever, flickers faintly back to life, when he has a kind of vision, which may or may not have to do with the Sioux legend of the White Buffalo Woman. And if this sounds a little too 'Twilight Zone/Outer Limits' far out, well it didn't seem that way while reading it. It's that well done. It WORKS, and is one of those goose-bumps, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-standing-up moments.

TWISTED TREE is a complex, beautifully written book. Meyers is obviously a man at the top of his game. Future graduate students in literature would do well to read this book in tandem with WINESBURG, OHIO. When they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they prefer Meyers. ( )