SHEEPSHAGGER

Griffiths comes storming out of Wales, much as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh have from Scotland, in an angry, violent, lyrical American debut about a rural killer.

The Welsh countryside may be a bleak place where children are conceived through “a knee-tremble in an outhouse,” the abandoned lead mine still “sweat[s] its sly venom,” and the rugged landscape defeats any attempts to walk upright, but the halfwit orphan Ianto loves it fiercely, the more so after he is dispossessed of his ancestral home. When he grows up to commit horrendous crimes, his former mates—hardly more articulate than he—try to understand how and why, or whether, to “Just fuckin accept-a fact that yer are things in-a world that yew’ll never fuckin be able to understand.” Their ongoing conversation in dialect is one thread of a three-fold narrative. Italicized sections in simple yet poetic prose offer scenes from Ianto’s childhood, with the violence of the natural world stirring and disturbing his senses. The story of his adult years is told in elevated diction that often soars, sometimes evokes the naturalist’s expertise (in a single paragraph about a sheep tick are “scutum,” “dermal,” “capitulum,” “chelicerae,” “hyposteme,” and “palps”) but occasionally overshoots the mark (bodies left on a battlefield are “defenestrated”). It also features a murder so graphic that some readers will want to skim, while the aimlessness of the main characters—unemployed, their Welsh cultural birthright replaced by a culture of casual brutality, drugs, and alcohol—sometimes makes the attention falter. The nationalist agenda portrays the posh English as regularly abusing the locals with verbal and sexual as well as economic violence: the one decent person here is an old woman who feeds and cleans Ianto and speaks only Welsh, the native language he cannot himself understand.

Powerful, mostly successful mix of primordial savagery and contemporary malaise told in fierce prose.