Review by Booklist Review
Michael Farris Smith, author of Desperation Road (2016) and Salvage This World (2023), continues his exploration of the fluidity of right and wrong, of the constantly shifting boundary between light and dark, in this new novel. The characters are wonderfully crafted: Burdean and Keal, two bad men sent to an abandoned church to retrieve something (but they're not told precisely what); an elderly woman, confused, whose name might be Wanetah; and a young girl, found in the church (is she what they were sent to retrieve?). The dialogue is stripped down to its bare essentials; the prose, on the other hand, is lush and vivid. Smith's short fiction has been nominated twice for the prestigious Pushcart Prize, and his previous novels have received stellar reviews. Expect this one, which is a crime novel but so much more than that, to receive the same enthusiastic response from readers. Recommended to anyone who appreciates fine writing, but especially to readers of Southern crime novelists like S. A. Cosby and James Lee Burke.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Smith (Salvage This World) unspools an atmospheric and spare Southern gothic of two unsavory men on a mysterious criminal odyssey and their encounter with a mystical young girl. At the story's center are the brutal Burdean and the haunted Keal, the latter of whom has premonition-filled dreams. Together, they travel through a blasted landscape of kudzu and wildfire embers. As Burdean explains to Keal, their mission is to enter the cellar of a particular church, where their task will reveal itself to them: "Whatever it is we'll know it when we see it." They find the church at the edge of a swamp, with the bodies of four dead men propped against the door. Inside, they retrieve what proves to be their quarry: a young girl who Keal senses is the one "responsible for the lighting of his dreams." With the girl in tow, the men continue on until they're tracked down by a woman named Cara, who understands the girl's power. As more betrayals and uncanny events ensue, the body count rises to an apocalyptic level. Smith sustains a feeling of slow-burning dread, shot through with vivid bursts of biblical imagery. This bracing fever dream is worth a look. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
In this stark Southern gothic, two Mississippi grifters grapple over the fate of a strange and elusive little girl. The mercenary-like Burdean and vulnerable Keal first encounter her in a church where extreme violence has taken place--dead bodies sprawl on the ground around still-running vehicles. They find the girl, who is speechless, next to a frail old woman Keal just encountered wandering through the woods in the middle of the night muttering nonsense--a woman "lost in head and heart and soul" whom he has seen in clairvoyant nightmares so intense that he does all he can to avoid sleep. The grifters, who have been hired to deliver the girl to unseen culprits for unstated reasons, find someone she will talk to when they take her and the woman back to the woman's house. The girl tells Cara, a victim of physical abuse who periodically drops by the house to look after the woman, that she [the girl] is "part of the hand of God." "I believed something was wrong in the night and there is still something wrong in the night and it has gathered itself in the flesh and blood of that girl," Cara muses. Plenty of blood gets spilled in this bleakly intense, darkly atmospheric novel--by shotgun, by raging wolf, by speeding car, by Cara's 6-inch wooden crucifix. In full possession of what the man who hires Burdean and Keal calls "grim poetry," Smith evokes "a dark so absolute that the light seemed to suck away into nothing," the trickery of consciousness and the precariousness of living in "a world that offered no explanations." For all that, Smith somehow locates hope in hopelessness, meaning in meaninglessness. To reverse something Keal says, when you care about the world, there is much to unravel, and doing so is part of being human. An eerie, transfixing page-turner. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
