In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends -- mostly poor cotton farmers -- form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-...
In ten stunning and bleak tales set in the woodlands, swamps, and chemical plants along the Alabama River, Tom Franklin stakes his claim as a fresh, original Southern voice. His lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing,...
Anyone interested in Southern US contemporary fiction who hasn't yet made acquaintance with Tom Franklin needs to do so. If you prefer a slice of the old South, 2003's Hell at the Breach , while super violent, is just a terrific (and terrifying) fictional account of a real skirmish in South Alab...
She didn’t even realize she was expecting someone to whisk him away—the dead mother, risen from her grave, or even the cowboy who brought him—until she decided to trim the baby’s fingernails, bendy but so sharp they’d scratched his cheeks. She put her curved scissors to his inch-long finger and h...
He’d called Angie the night before to say he wasn’t coming but they could have lunch the next day. He’d slept badly and even dreamed about Larry Ott, though the dream was gone by the time he sat up amid his tangled wet sheets to reassemble its strange narrative. On the drive to The Hub he called ...