I usually don’t like to write blogs about books that I haven’t finished yet but I feel really, really good about Moonrise by Cassandra King.  I read the description of the book and it really is spot on saying that Moonrise is a homage to Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier with a southern gothic twist.  It is a story of love, friendship, secrets, betrayal and forgiveness.

Helen Honeycutt and Emmett Justice meet in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida after both moving there to escape their pasts.  After a whirlwind romance they are married much to the shock of Emmett’s friends since his wife, Rosalyn, was killed in a car accident only months before.  Helen becomes fascinated with Emmett’s previous life and his group of friends especially the time that they spent in Highlands, North Carolina.  Rosalyn’s family home, “Moonrise”, is a mysterious house full of ghosts and secrets of the past, and Helen, after much cajoling, talks Emmett into spending the summer there.

Helen soon realizes that she will never fit in with Emmett’s “jet-set” friends and when she discovers a the truth about a secret of the past will her new found happiness soon come to a end.

I love how Cassandra King has structured the telling of this story.  Each chapter is written from the perspective of three different characters: Helen, the newcomer, Tansy, an old friend to Emmett and Rosalyn, and Willa, a property manager but insider to this group of friends.  Since the book is written this way the reader is given different perspectives as the story unfolds.  I highly recommend Moonrise for your next read and I have to sign off now so I can finish the book on my lunch break!

Cassandra King will be at Lemuria tonight, September 18, signing Moonrise at 5 pm and reading at 5:30.

Woodrell’s latest expands his fictional universe with dance hall blast and mystery

In 2010 success of the movie Winter’s Bone finally and fully awakned all the reading world to the Tom Sauk Mountain of literature Ozarker Daniel Woodrell has created. Now with his latest, The Maid’s Version: A Novel, the count is nine novels and a short story collection, five of them New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and almost all of them set in the Missouri Ozarks.

No better way to unpack the totality of his fabled and invented Ozarks town of West Table than to explode a dance hall in the midst of it. The Arbor Dance Hall blast of 1929 is the big bang central to a whole universe that is surely and supplely, inclusively and beautifully Woodrell’s best novel yet.

His previous novels have arisen from an instinct he coined, “Country Noir.” His main characters, mostly rural poor or impoverished denizens of Ozarks towns rarely keep steady employment unless it is illicit, and, true to much Ozarks living, frequently lack options or even the impulse control to make choices aside from the very worst. Few current writers can touch Woodrell for making abject poverty and forlorn crime compelling on the page without pandering, condescending, or ennobling what is just dirty, raw economic hardship.

In The Maid’s Version, though, Woodrell brings to life high and low alike. In many previous novels, such as the great Tomato Red, the country club set of West Table, the elite who call the shots, are a snobby klatch of meanies who destroy lives and hope but rarely rate a speaking part. Meanwhile rakish ne’er do wells, drug abusers, prostitutes, and Robin Hoods take center stage. The Maid’s Version sidelines the hardened criminals and brings the low but mostly honorable Dunahews—a house maid, her free-spirited sister (mistress often to the wealthy), sons, and grandson narrator—into close and profound contact with bankers and landowners, whose lives are morally complex, filled with good and evil and even some humane if guilt-driven charitable gestures.

Woodrell’s unforgettable glimpses of the many who gathered and died at the Dance Hall seem to pay, in style, a kind of hillbilly homage to another towering Missouri writer, the late Evan S. Connell of Kansas City. Woodrell detonates brief explosions of life, such as the birdshot vignette of Dimple Powell, beautiful like all the Powells, and off to her first and last dance under watch of her nervous and soon-to-be bereaved father. In The Maid’s Version, the breadth of Woodrell’s universe is expanded so beyond the bounds of the mystery that propels the plot, readers will find themselves aggrieved and longing in the red-shift passage of sailing blast victims and guilt-ridden, grief stricken, and damaged survivors of its fiery bang. And readers will emerge instantly desirous to return to his corner of the Ozarks, now broadened and starry as a galaxy.

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Steve Yates, a native of the Missouri Ozarks, is the author of Morkan’s Quarry: A Novel and Some Kinds of Love: Stories.

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Daniel Woodrell will sign The Maid’s Version: A Novel at Lemuria Books, Thursday, September 19 at 5 p.m. with a reading at 5:30 p.m. The Maid’s Version is Lemuria’s September First Editions Club Selection.

The Maid’s Version: A Novel Daniel Woodrell, Little, Brown and Company, Hardback $25.00, 176 pages

Living in Mississippi for the last 7 years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what makes Southern literature so great. Is it the culture of story-telling? The unique lives of families that have lived in the same place for generations? The dialect? The struggle of being a place so long ignored by the beast to the North?

Eudora Welty said this:

It is nothing new or startling that Southerners do write–probably they must write. It is the way they are:born readers and reciters, great document holders, diary keeps, letter exchangers and savers, history tracers–and, outstaying the rest, great talkers. -from Place and Time: The Southern Writer’s Inheritance

Let me be completely honest, here–that makes me jealous. The South will always only be a place I almost understand.

I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s Cities on the Plain, the third book in his Border Trilogy. And it is set 20 miles from my hometown–Las Cruces, New Mexico. McCarthy made the landscape come alive with his descriptions–the creosote smell in the rain, the sun rising and setting, the Franklin and Sacramento mountains at dusk. For a little while, I got to go home again. Pure nostalgia. When John Grady asks, “Who do you think killed Colonel Fountain?” I not only know who Colonel Fountain was, but I know his great-niece, and she is still a little mad that her Great-Uncle was murdered. (If you want to know more about Albert Fountain, check this out) But it’s not familiarity that makes Southern books great, because details aren’t enough; the place has to come alive on the pages.

In Mississippi, we read a lot of books. And many of those books are set in hometowns, amongst the people we know. In the South, the writer has to capture everything just how it is, because everyone is going to read your book, and if you didn’t get the details correct, you will hear about it.