Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
My rating: 5/5 cats
one of the best books i have read, ever.
and exactly what i was looking for when i posted my query in my very own readers’ advisory group. so, thank you, james, this is a perfect suggestion to the kind of book i was looking for. and i am going to immerse myself in tom franklin’s backlist and tell all my friends, etc.
but right now, i don’t know how to review it. with a book this meaty, i find it difficult to do plot-reviews without giving away too much, as i get overexcited about sharing the book. will does a good job, though, with dignified restraint. i can only do tone-reviews of something that kicked my ass so hard.
remember when stephen king paid a lot of attention to the craft of writing, before he became a machine of churning out books editors were afraid to edit because he’s stephen bloody king, and he “knows what he’s doing??” stephen king became stephen king because he started out as a careful storyteller. he always had a knack for building and filling a scene, creating characters with dimensions, and building tension around them that was more powerful because the characters were fleshed-out and not just stand-ins for something for the action to happen to. this is what a lot of modern horror writers forget, that it’s not just about scary things happening, it is about scary things happening to characters who have begun to matter to the reader.
and this is not a horror novel, but the tremendous larry ott character does read a lot of stephen king throughout this novel, as a kid and as an adult, and the childhood scenes read a lot like stephen king, to me, before some sort of alien or clown comes to get ’em. the coming of age, eye-opening stuff, far from idyllic, is so richly detailed. and larry ott and silas jones are characters to care about, despite all their mistakes and how you wanna just shake both of them sometimes.
the story is a different kind of horror. life is brutal with murder and racism and persecution and hollow loneliness and missed opportunities. this is such a frustrating situation. books like this kill me – when characters endure years of isolation and heartache that could be resolved with one conversation. but by “kill me,” i of course mean “delight me.”
okay, some basic plot.
larry ott is the town whipping boy, ever since the first girl he took to a drive-in vanished without a trace. now, he is 41, lives in his childhood home, while his mother lingers in a nursing home, his abusive father is dead, and he buys a lot of books through the mail. already ostracized, vandalized, and avoided – when another girl goes missing, suspicion naturally falls on him.
silas jones is now the town constable, returned after many years away. his is a story of life on the other side of the color divide, with a single mother trying to raise him, essentially squatting in larry’s father’s shed, where they strike up a boyhood friendship ultimately marred by larry’s father and the cruelties of adolescence.
larry as a kid is heartbreaking. so earnest, so smart, so reaching out for affection.
silas – oh, god – his mother’s story, so buried in his own, is worth the whole of the book. i am choking with tenderness and silas-anger.
i just loved this book. the mystery, the characters, the quiet of it all. it is sad, but resigned to its own sadness. anything else i could say would just be inarticulate squawking.
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