Like Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro or Steve Earle’s I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, Wilkes' debut is a rich...
The epic saga of two Kentucky hillbillies in the wicked heart of the American South.
Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor might or might not embrace this backwoods odyssey, but proper Kentuckians Hunter S. Thompson and Johnny Depp would be cackling to beat the devil over this brazen tribute to folklore, tradition, and hillbilly rituals. It’s certainly true that Wilkes (Barn Dances & Jamborees Across Kentucky, 2013) knows this territory, integrating similar imagery into his day job as lead singer of rockabilly band The Legendary Shack Shakers. Here, our unnamed protagonist sets out to discover a storied home where an elderly couple is said to have been eaten by an invasive species of vine. As with any proper voyage, he hopes to win glory and earn back his love, Delilah Vessels, stolen away by cad Stoney Kingston. Playing Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote is Carver Canute: “He’s a cocky Elvis-haired hell-raiser who keeps his pompadour aloft with pork drippin’s, sweat, and a wafting circle of lies.” Armed with supplies and a harmonica from Cracker Barrel, our heroes head up The Old Spur Line, a dark path leading into the woods, where strange encounters await. What’s fascinating is how Wilkes taps into ancient archetypes to transform everyday characters into phantasmagoric figures by wrapping them in Southern euphemisms, counterintuitive contexts, and florid language more at home in a pulpit. Strange noises in the woods could be from a tectonic crack or a “Hell Hole” that serves as a portal to the damned. A moody group of role-players becomes a vampire cult that roams the woods looking for victims. For the narrator, God is simply “the only daddy I know.” For anyone who grew up in the South, it’s an epic of Wagnerian proportions.
Like Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro or Steve Earle’s I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, Wilkes' debut is a rich and heartfelt yarn that resonates as deeply as his music.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937512-55-2
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
A terrifying new storytelling experience that affirms, even in our darkest moments, that love conquers all.
A female big-rig driver crisscrosses America searching for signs of the wife everyone else thinks is dead.
This spooky third novel by Welcome to Night Vale creator Fink (It Devours!, 2017, etc.) is similarly based on an original podcast and offers a more threatening but equally personal take on the horror genre. Switching from the podcast’s intimate first-person narration, delivered with powerful emotion by actress Jasika Nicole, allows Fink to stretch out into the more remote corners of his mythos while delivering the same scary beats. The main character is Keisha Taylor, whose wife, Alice, disappeared while working for the mysterious Bay and Creek trucking company: “No cause of death. No body. No certainty. There was a disappearance, and after a long and increasingly hopeless search, the presumption of death.” Now Keisha has taken a job with the company as a long-haul driver, which thrusts her firmly into the eerie mythology at work here. Keisha is a fascinating character partially because one of her defining characteristics is chronic anxiety, and it’s a potent imperfection for a character who battles literal monsters on a regular basis. Along the way, Fink unveils the strange universe that swallowed Alice whole, revealing an underground war between two secret societies, time-bending oracles, and other Lovecraft-ian horrors. He also gives Keisha a charismatic ally in Sylvia Parker, a teen on the run who becomes her “anxiety bro,” and a bloodcurdling enemy in the macabre, twisted police officer who stalks her across the span of the country. But the book also tempers its terrors with everyday humanity, portraying the mundane joys of love, the rich fabric of the American countryside, and surreal “Why did the chicken cross the road?” jokes that are a hallmark of the podcast. By the time Keisha learns Alice's fate, readers will realize that this marvelous character is more than the sum of her faceless anxiety or her very real fears.
A terrifying new storytelling experience that affirms, even in our darkest moments, that love conquers all.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-284413-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's a few thousand years from now, a time of widened horizons but all too familiar contours. The nine known worlds have joined in a sort of interstellar U.N.; the government of Urras has peacefully diverted its anarchists to a world of their own, Anarres, the moon; and now an Annaresti physicist named Shevek (cast in the mold of the ancient Terran Ainsetein) has formulated a theory that will dissolve the barrier of time, only to confront the confounding limitations of humanoid politics. This could so easily have been so bad — the Cold War opposition of Anarres and Urras, grimly heroic collectivity versus brilliant, corrupt high civilization, and these as seen by a character of such unmitigated nobility, who would be disruptive in any society in any case — it is amazing how Le Guin has lightened it up, made it all plausible, and not only that, restored the impact of her point, which is made late and glancingly. The novel flashes back and forth, before and after Shevek's historic trip to Urras, which ends centuries of segregation, and delicately develops both the strengths and weaknesses of the two social systems, the contrasting textures of two kinds of social experience. On Anarres Shevek was a frustrated "egoist"; on Urras he is an exploitable novelty. But in both worlds, there are relationships, and things done in certain ways, and objects firmly there to be seen; and Shevek, in the usual slot of naive-genius plot convenience and destined Charlton Heston vehicle, is a complete, fully active mentality. All through, this impresses with small but incalculably right choices which add up solidly and confirm Mrs. Le Guin as one of our finest projectionists of brave old and other worlds.
Pub Date: May 8, 1974
ISBN: 006051275X
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1974
© 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.
