CompleteMartialArts.com - Twilight
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List Price: $14.00
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Manufacturer: MacAdam Cage
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781596922648
ISBN: 1596922648
Label: MacAdam Cage
Manufacturer: MacAdam Cage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 225
Publication Date: 2007-09-07
Publisher: MacAdam Cage
Studio: MacAdam Cage
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Editorial Reviews:
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From the acclaimed author of Provinces of Night, a Southern gothic novel about an undertaker who won t let the dead rest. Suspecting that something is amiss with their father s burial, teenager Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie venture to his gravesite and make a horrific discovery: their father, a whiskey bootlegger, was not actually buried in the casket they bought for him. Worse, they learn that the undertaker, Fenton Breece, has been grotesquely manipulating the dead. Armed with incriminating photographs, Tyler becomes obsessed with bringing the perverse undertaker to justice. But first he must outrun Granville Sutter, a local strongman and convicted murderer hired by Fenton to destroy the evidence. What follows is an adventure through the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled roads, rusted machinery, and eccentric squatters old men, witches, and families among them who both shield and imperil Tyler as he runs for safety. With his poetic, haunting prose, William Gay rewrites the rules of the gothic fairytale while exploring the classic Southern themes of good and evil.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Read Cormac McCarthy instead
Comment: One reviewer calls Gay the Cormac McCarthy of TN. That person must not have read McCarthy's TN novels; McCarthy is the McCarthy of TN, and of everywhere else, and what Gay offers here is a long winded feeble immitation of McCarthy tone, sentence structure, word choices, and subject matter. I don't know why anybody would want to watch a not quite sharp cover band when the real thing can be seen.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Southern Gothic at its Best
Comment: William Gay continues to uphold the tradition of Faulkner and O'Connor with this new story of cruel violence and perversion. There are moments where the reading invokes an experience of complete immersion in the events of the scene that has happened only rarely to me. The ending does seem a bit tacked on and predictable, but doesn't completely upend the effectiveness of the work.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Like Huck Finn with Necrophilia
Comment: I'm a fan of "literary genre fiction" - if that doesn't sound too much like a contradiction - and picked up William Gay's 'Twilight' after reading about it in one of Stephen King's Entertainment Weekly columns. It was one of his Best Of '07 books, and he compared it to Cormac McCarthy's work, which I hold in very high esteem, so I decided to read it.
In all honesty, it is very similar to McCarthy's works. Thematically, of course. The dark crevasses of humanity are well-lighted. Violence, bloodshed, necrophilia, and extortion abound in the first act of the book. It seems almost like a mixture of 'Child of God' and 'No Country for Old Men', if you ask me. I hate to compare the two authors so much as to draw confusion between them, but they have similar styles and thematic concerns. All apologies.
Oh, and is it oh so well-written. Gay's colloquial way of writing conversational prose is excellent, but he'll often drop beautifully rendered phrases and passages on you to show that he's the real deal when it comes to language.
The only problem is that I think the second act drags more than it should. For a short book, I shouldn't have to notice that, 'Oh man, they've been chasing each other for a long time.' And that's sort of what happens. Like the title of the review suggests, you almost think it's like a Mark Twain adventure in the woods of Tennessee.
The colorful secondary characters that pop up stave off the tedium of reading that second act, so it's not that bad. Overall. I think 'Twilight' is a book best suited for those who really like the Southern Gothic aesthetic and are looking for an author not afraid to break right through taboos.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Starts with a bang, ends in predictability
Comment: An occasionally grisly Southern gothic novel, "Twilight" is intriguing throughout, but doesn't quite lead to the fireworks finale you'd expect.
First thing's first: When I started to read "Twilight," one thing caught my eye above all others, and that was author William Gay's staggering command of vocabulary and the English language. Stylistically, he knows how to construct sentences and paragraphs that leave the reader feeling almost unworthy in his presence.
Because of Gay's obvious literary talents, "Twilight" sort of feels like it is beneath him. The story proceeds down a typical genre path and, save for one particular scene involving necrophilia and another scene involving an old woman who isn't who she at first seems to be, there are few surprises throughout.
As teenage lead Kenneth Tyler journeys further and further into rural Tennessee's decomposing backwoods, chased by hired killer Granville Sutter, who wants to retrieve pictures Tyler has that incriminate mortician Fenton Breece in abhorrently criminal after-hours behavior, the book's interest lies in Gay's textural, atmospheric depiction of the one-of-a-kind setting and in the question of whether Sutter is going to catch Tyler. The latter point, however, is predictable, and the final pages elicit little more than a shrug, especially considering that Granville Sutter and Fenton Breece are potentially brilliant villains, horrifically conceived but not used to their fullest abilities.
"Twilight" is worth a read, indeed, but this is one case where the writing is superior to what is ultimately offered by the plot.
Customer Rating:
Summary: EVIL, EVIL EVIL....
Comment: Called a `Southern Gothic' by critics and reviewers, I got interested in this dark tale by Stephen King. He has a column on the last page of Entertainment Weekly (someone gave me a gift subscription and admittedly I have enjoyed this guilty pleasure) He is in the there about once every 3rd week or so, and in this issue he had a year end `Best Of' list. TWILIGHT was his book of the year so I had to have it. Now after reading this excellent book, I respect Mr. King even more for his depth in reading. William Gay himself describes this story as a modern Hansel and Gretel...which it is, but no fairy tale, as horrifying as they could be, ever read like this. Gay has an eloquent writing style that wraps you in his world right off the bat. (I just ordered another book of his) This tale of good and evil turns into a lengthy cat and mouse chase thru the rural sticks of Tennessee in the 1950's, and we feel the adrenaline of one who is being chased for much of the book. The story deals with a brother and sister that find out some most disturbing facts about the local funeral director. They steal a briefcase from him and discover some incriminating photos which they try to blackmail him with. This backfires when he hires a monstrous ex-con to `take care' of his problem. No more from me. If you like an edge of your seat kind of read....then, by all means....scare yourself silly with this terrifying and beautifully written Southern Gothic.
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