A subversive twist on Southern myths that’s surprisingly rich in its execution.
Two brothers return home to rural Arkansas to face their ordained destiny.
Middleton (An Dantomine Eerly, 2010) edits an imprint of Counterpoint Press and is clearly no stranger to the attractions of horror-tinged fiction. In his new novel, he spins an eerie Southern gothic about a down-on-his-luck country singer who comes home for his twin brother’s wedding. The book opens on Jordan Bayne, an ex-con and occasional country picker slumming in San Antonio. Jordan is a hot mess who has never been able to escape the shadow of his brother, Malcolm, a successful insurance agent, or his father, Walker, a legendary bluegrass artist. He is, quite simply, haunted: “From a place deeper than bone, Malcolm," he tells his brother. "A force pulling me into the dark. I tried to make it stop, but it didn’t come from one place; it came from all over, every inch of my body. I couldn’t run from it, neither. Wherever I went, there it was. Drinking ain’t a fraction bad as what’s calling out for me, brother.” This fractious reunion is set in the Ozark Mountains, and Middleton deftly captures the simmering violence and country noir that lie just beneath the surface of this rural veneer. There are strong female characters here in the person of Malcolm’s fiancee, Elizabeth Truitt, and Jordan’s old flame, Leah Fayette, but it’s a story rooted in male-on-male violence and its repercussions. As Jordan digs into his family history, he discovers that one of every set of twins in his family has always murdered their father. The book also offers up superbly creepy boogeymen in Andridge Grieves, a creature of local legend, and his minion, Obediah Cob. Along the way, Middleton deftly mixes history into his tale, unraveling the untimely ends of Jordan and Malcolm’s ancestors. It’s a well-carved story of a family’s curse, as brittle and grotesque as any works in the vein of Faulkner or O’Connor.
A subversive twist on Southern myths that’s surprisingly rich in its execution.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945814-29-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
