- ISBN13: 9781596922648
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
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 manipulati… More >>
#1 by v81 on April 16, 2010 - 6:32 pm
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.
Rating: 1 / 5
#2 by BookWoman/BookMan TV REVIEWS on April 16, 2010 - 7:19 pm
All about an undertaker where teenagers make a terrible discovery in this story about the nature of good and evil by one of the South’s best writers.
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Bookworm on April 16, 2010 - 7:22 pm
A couple of days I ago I read in a German newspaper about this book. As the German translation is not available for the Kindle yet, I bought the English version. So far I like the book even though the author definitely doesn’t have Cormac McCarthy’s genius. Anyway, I’d rate the book with 4 stars if there weren’t those damned typos. On nearly every page wordsare writtentogether likethis … and this is no fun to read. Also at least one passage is duplicated. Is there no such thing like quality control for Kindle books? Because of this I can only rate it with 2 stars in total …
Rating: 2 / 5
#4 by JoeV on April 16, 2010 - 8:29 pm
This author has been christened the new “Southern Gothic writer of our times”. I’ll be honest – I’m not exactly sure what that label means. I do know I thoroughly enjoy this man’s books and Twilight is no exception. The central characters in this very dark novel include an undertaker who is goose-pimply loathsome; a young brother and sister duo who take it upon themselves to expose the immoral mortician at great personal risk: while on their mission the siblings are pursued by an indestructible and un-arrestable thug, hired by the undertaker to “remove” them. The setting is rural Tennessee sometime after the Second World War.
If there is a fault with this book, it’s the lack of a “deep” story line which is not much more than what I stated above. This tale is more a collection of vignettes and there is an inevitability to it – which for that reason reminded me of Cold Mountain. The writing also bears more than a slight resemblance to Cormac McCarthy’s – although there is some humor sprinkled throughout Twilight. What drives the books are the four major characters mentioned above – and the folks they encounter along the way.
This book is not for all reading tastes. It is very dark – although not depressing – and it is sparse. It is also extremely well written and an engaging read. So for a change of pace – highly recommended.
Rating: 4 / 5
#5 by Smithville on April 16, 2010 - 10:37 pm
Gravyrich in language and texture, Twilight tells the basic tale of good vs. evil in anything but basic terms.
Adjectives best describe Gay’s game. To whit, he always skips the hyphen: “illformed” creature; “floodleft” debris; “drownedlooking” chickens; “dirtspecked” glass; punishment for “piethievery”; “windbrought” rain.
However, his use of descriptive words and phrases ultimately slices Twilight with a doubleedged sword. On one hand, his adjectiverich wordplay is crunchycandy for the senses. On the other hand, it insists that you chew really carefully so you don’t miss the nuance of its flavors.
Take this book for the ride, not for the story (which, while a good one, is secondary to the frosting of the wordplay). Take it slowly even though you’ll want to know what happens next or you’ll miss out on the besttasting stuff.
Bottomline: there’s certainly enough here to satiate a wordhungry palate.
Rating: 4 / 5