Gods of Howl Mountain by Taylor Brown
My rating: 5/5 cats
sitting here, trying to figure out how to describe this book, what keeps running through my mind are some of the lyrics from warren zevon’s Indifference of Heaven:
I had a girl
Now she’s gone
She left town
Town burned down
which is the quintessence of zevon’s dark-molasses humor, but it’s also a pretty good way to classify authors across the grit-lit spectrum: will they or won’t they burn down the damn town? Frank Bill, Donald Ray Pollock, Clifford Jackman – they will burn their towns down. they will probably burn your town down.
Tom Franklin, Ron Rash, Daniel Woodrell are not town-burners. Cormac McCarthy is capricious- he will burn or abstain from burning as the mood strikes him. Taylor Brown, however, from the two books i have read by him, does not appear to be a town-burner. so for those of you who are made uncomfortable by the jolly nihilism of town-burning grit lit, you might could enjoy this one. it’s not a sunny Jan Karon novel – there’s beatings, murder, guns, snake-handling, an eyeball in a jar, prostitution, rum-running, car-racing, marijuana-puffing, and many broken bones and spilled blood. but at the end of it all, there’s enough left standing to feel some hope.
it’s just excellent storytelling – set in north carolina in the 1950s in a community whose citizens are very much aware of each others’ crimes, proclivities, and weaknesses, separated from the rest of the country by their mountainous geography, but still subject to its pesky prohibition laws, it’s where memories are long and justice takes many forms, usually unaccompanied by a badge. rory docherty is just back from the war, having left his leg in korea, and now he’s living with his granny may, delivering moonshine up and down the mountain in his souped-up ride for eustace uptree, the biggest bootlegger on the mountain. granny may is a former prostitute (mostly) retired into a folk healer, dispensing herbs and potions to all who dare or deign to approach, protected (mostly) by her witchy reputation and the power of eustace’s favor. rory’s mother/granny may’s daughter bonni has been institutionalized for rory’s whole life, after an attack by a group of masked men left her mute, rory’s father dead, and one of the perp’s eyes scooped out by bonni in self-defense. bonni is barely in the book, but her absence is a constant pressure between rory and granny may, a space filled with unasked questions, unspoken accusations, grief, rage, regret.
it’s a powderkeg of a book, but there’s nothing flashy about it. sure, there’s plenty of violence and menace, but it’s a quiet kind of storytelling, like the quiet of a wild animal sizing you up, that you underestimate at your own peril.
She prayed while he was in Korea. Prayed and prayed. Not to the church-god, exactly. To her own. One that lived closer, up on the mountain, perhaps. For here was a place fit for a god to live, not in any building or book. Here she was understood. She was wicked, sure, but no hypocrite. She had fought every day of her life, same as the beasts of the field. The bloody Christ nailed naked and roaring to the cross – his bones iron-split, his body whip-flayed to the meat – he was hard as they come. Surely he prized grit, a game heart. Same as she did.
granny may is the clear star of the book, a complete badass spitfire that gets all the best lines
”Christ’s father let him die on that cross,” she said. “I understand why he done it.” She leaned closer, whispering: “But Christ never had no granny like me.”
not just the easy-to-cheer-for action hero lines like that, but also the most nuanced ruminations about life, love, sex, duty, family, the mountains, formulated while sitting on her front porch, smoking her pipe, taking what comes her way and surviving.
it’s a book that is life-hard but still life-affirming, and as much as i do love the salt-the-earth overkill of the grittiest lit, sometimes it’s nice to have a town to come back home to.
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review to come, but yesssssssssssssss!
