William Gay

The one author - aside from my brother-in-law David Anthony Durham - who's progress I monitor most eagerly, is William Gay. His writing crackles with vivid description and lucid melancholia capable of making a tee-totaller reach for the bottle. His is a world of the American south.
Gothic, humorous, elemental and dark.

As a writer I often feel like a fake, a phony, regurgitating the thoughts and words of others. Gay is someone who seems true to his work. How far does his imagination stretch? Are these stories he's picked up from saloon conversations, long-dead uncles or grandparents? Durham once read with him on a book-tour for Doubleday and he described a man just as I'd imagined after reading his books.

He has a new novel coming out soon, Twilight, about a young man who uncovers the murky truth behind a local undertaker. Chased through the witch-ridden woods by a local hired killer, Gay rewrites the gothic fairytale for the modern American South.

The following blurbs came from Amazon:

Gay (The Long Home) fills the book with haunting imagery and shocking, morbid and (surprisingly) hopeful turns as twisted justice gets meted out. Language lovers who are not faint of heart won't want to miss this one.
(Oct. 20) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Though Gay has sometimes been compared with Faulkner, it's Davis Grubb and his wonderful novel The Night of the Hunter that provides much of the inspiration here (a quote from Grubb opens the novel's second section). Though veering sometimes dangerously close to melodrama, Gay seems incapable of writing a dull sentence, and Twilight is further redeemed by his brilliant gift for dialogue, his occasional dark humor, and his utterly convincing portrayal of the reality of ruination and of evil.
Michael Cart
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