Country: USA
Genre: Southern Gothic
Pages: 224
The girl moved ahead amongst the gravestones with a sense of purpose but the boy hung back as if he'd had second thoughts or had other places to be. She turned a flashlight on and off again immediately though in truth she hadn't needed it.
Here, she said. This one here.
Yeah, the boy said. Rain ran out of his hair and down his face. His clothing was already soaked and you could hear water in his boots as he walked. This is crazy as shit, he said.
You've seen me before. I'm that guy with a different book under his arm every week. My friends like to look at them, ask me if they would like it, read the back blurb and give it back to me. "I don't know how you do this, I don't have time to read," is something I hear a lot. This week, I had an unusual number of quirky comments about the book I was reading. "Ben, you're reading TWILIGHT? What the fuck is wrong with you?" Things like that. Yeah I read TWILIGHT, a novel by southern gothic writer William Gay, who happened to be one ghastly looking badass. His literary legacy is also very badass amongst southern writers. He was considered another link of the chain that included William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy. So yeah, I didn't have any problems reading a novel titled TWILIGHT. In fact, I have two Gay novels in the TBR and thought I would read this one first, because of the obvious irony factor of the title. Turned out William Gay's TWILIGHT might not sell as much as Stephenie Meyer's but you won't find as many copies at used bookstore and charity bazaars. It's not exactly throwaway literature.
It's not an easy book either. Gay doesn't give his reader anything for free. There is a crime-driven plot to it, but it reads at times like a magical realism novel. TWILIGHT is the story of two teenagers, Kenneth and Corrie Tyler, who just lost their father, a local whiskey bootlegger. Convinced there was something wrong with his burial, they go dig up his body. Surprisingly enough, their father isn't even in the casket under his tombstone. They dig up more tombs, only to find horror over horror. The local undertaker has been messing around with the dead folk. Kenneth becomes obsessed with retribution on Fenton Breece, but the undertaker is a wealthy man and he hires strongman and psychopath Granville Sutter to get rid of the Tyler youth. But it's always complicated to hire muscle you cannot control.
While I enjoyed reading TWILIGHT, it left me in a pensive state more than anything else. It was an enigma, more than a wonder. I think of it like stumbling upon an incomplete puzzle. Maybe it's the feeling its supposed to elicit after all, who knows? William Gay's prose is so detail oriented and he is to hell-bent on describing the south in all its beauty, there's a bulk of the appeal in TWILIGHT that doesn't really have to do with the plot at all. The descriptions reminded me of Alejo Carpentier's novels as the prose brings evident comparisons to Cormac McCarthy with the lack of dialogue tags. I thought it didn't do Gay any service though, because his prose is a lot more descriptive than McCarthy's who brought this really skewed and minimalist aesthetic to complement his lack of dialogue tags. It's not a big deal, because it's still really grim, surreal and utterly singular and imaginative. It's just that the way it's built requires a certain type of reading and a serious dedication. Maybe, what I'm trying to say is that it's not a very focused reading experience. There is a lot of gazing and wandering around.
Sutter shot him in the left temple and the right side of his head exploded in a pink mist of blood and bonemeal and he flung backward and fell limp and ragged as if he'd been stuffed with sawdust.
I sound overly critical of TWILIGHT, but it was a cool reading experience. I love the idea that not every coming-of-age is positive. That it can be a grinding, scarring experience. Gay's characters are colorful and have an austere beauty to them. They live in a time and place where everybody had to fend for themselves and as savage and gory the novel is, it feels like an ideal south. The place the southern U.S of today aches to be. That might be the biggest accomplishment of this novel, which is to describe with such a rough charm, a place that lives up to the mythologies. I finished TWILIGHT unsure of where I stood about William Gay. I was overwhelmed, sure but also bludgeoned a little bit by this crazy vision. I'm going to connect the dots on this guy. You know when I said Gay wasn't throwaway literature? What I meant by that, is that it's the kind of book that adds layer over layer of meaning with multiple readings. It's literature that needs love and hard work. It's a work of art before it's a story, before it's a product.
THREE STARS