Bull Mountain by Brian Panowich
My rating: 4/5 cats
“What do you do when you can’t reach a hornet’s nest?”
“You set fire to the tree.”
sometimes a hornet’s nest is more than a hornet’s nest.
and many trees will be sacrificed.
and i hear you, “wait, another literary crime thriller about moonshine and meth and a sorta backcountry mafia where murder is all in a day’s work?? is there any juice left to wring out of this suddenly overexposed genre??”
yes! because location! where we are dealing with
“Some baller from up in Georgia. I didn’t even know they had ballers in Georgia. Backwoods motherfucker.”
and this is one hell of a baller. we’re actually dealing with several generations of ballers comprising the burroughs family and their adopted family of likeminded individuals, all holed up in the mountains of north georgia, where they have transitioned from running a moonshine enterprise into its modern-day equivalent: meth. and guns. and a dislike of anyone who tries to step in and interfere with their business, whether it be competitors, the law, associates suddenly wanting a bigger cut of the action, or even family.
this debut opens with a fantastically taut and surprising chapter that sets the tone for the whole book, which then unfolds across time and through several storylines encompassing both the members of the burroughs clan and an atf agent intent on bringing them down.
clayton burroughs is the main focus—a man who left bull mountain and his kin behind to become sheriff in waymore valley, bringing what order he can to his community, but adhering to the philosophy that “what happens on bull mountain stays on bull mountain.” that is, until agent holly comes sniffing around looking for some cooperation from clayton’s brother hal in closing a case in which hal is tangentially involved. although clayton has been estranged from his brother, and the rest of the inhabitants on bull mountain, he takes the offer and the warning up the mountain to hal, who is…unimpressed.
the rest of the ebb and flow of the book supplies motive, backstory, revelations, and bucketfuls of blood—all the things people want out of their southern crime fiction in glorious violent technicolor. because trees aren’t the only things that can be set on fire.
it’s a dark and twisty debut, and the strength of the writing elevates this above “just another grit lit novel.” it’s definitely familiar territory for those of us who read widely in the genre, but it’s terrifically paced and plotted, and while the argument can be made that it’s a little too conveniently tidy in some of its concluding bits, it’s still a wonderfully engrossing read and frequently surprising.
i will be needing more from this author.
