Another historical-ish retelling, this one recounts the explosion of a dance hall in 1929 and what was the result of the aftermath.  While there are plenty of really heartrending and macabre vignettes detailing certain folks who attended the disaster, the primary focus of the story is the narration of Alek, the grandson of the titular maid, Alma.  This feels more like southern fried Bronte, and not nearly as captivating as what could have been.  Guess I prefer outlaw Woodrell to historian Woodrell.

The bloom might be off the rose a bit.  I think I’m OD’ing on Daniel Woodrell.  This latest felt like the pan scrapings from all the novels to come previous.  The end result is kind of a lesser, mule-kicked cousin to the previous work.  There’s nothing wrong with being derivative of yourself, I suppose, but it wasn’t as saucy as I had hoped.

I want to believe that Daniel Woodrell is some kind of Hillbilly Hemingway, a moonshine jug in one hand and a sawed off shotgun in the other, writing with his fucking feet as someone strums banjo behind him.  So this story felt a little on the nose, though I suspect it’s Woodrell shouting “Here’s yer fucking Portnoy’s Complaint, y’all bunch of citified cockfisters.”  Excuse my french.

One of Woodrell’s earliest novels, it follows a fictional group of bushwhackers as they engage in the guerilla warfare of Quantrill’s Raiders in the Kansas-Missouri battles of the American Civil War.  It blends real and made-up, and while it’s savage in its portrayal of the brutality where everyone was a son-of-a-bitch during the war, it kind of meanders and the pacing gets languorous.

A satisfying finale to the Bayou trilogy, we finally get to meet the Shade family patriarch, John X. Shade.  This is, of course, as he flees home with his ten-year-old daughter Etta after her mother stole $47K from a psychotic gangster named Lunch and pinned it on John X. It’s wistful and woeful and violent as a motherfucker.  In the hands of a lesser author, it would have been preachy and parabled.  Here, it’s juuuuust right.

It’s not what you tell so much as how you tell it, and this second of the Bayou trilogy is a corker.  A trio of robbers, members of a prison gang called The Wing, are hitting poker games run by the gangster mucketymucks who run much of St. Bruno.  Shade is partnered with his former childhood pal Shuggie Zeck, who’s now a bagman for Mr. B, and neither of them particularly are proud of what the other has become.  It’s a violent and brutal tale, […]