The Bear Bryant Funeral Train [Paperback]

Brad Vice (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 27, 2007

A displaced young woman contemplates the difference between the madness of a Klan meeting and a mob of escaped asylum inmates. A rancher's son seeks to flee a hardscrabble Texas life via a football scholarship. A cookbook author perfects her latest recipe by giving new meaning to the phrase "made with love." An aging farmer meddles in voodoo. A computer designer plans an elaborate, digitally fabricated hoax. And looming over all is the ghost of Alabama's greatest football coach... This controversial collection, infamously pulped by its initial publisher, is now resurrected. The nine original stories--praised in national reviews--are presented as they were initially intended by the author, and are augmented by one previously unpublished tale. Also included: an introduction by Vice (explaining for the first time his side of the imbroglio surrounding the 2005 hardcover edition), and contextual commentary by other authors and scholars. Ultimately, however, readers will judge this book by its primary powers: the strength and integrity of the storytelling--vibrant, exciting, and, finally, original.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The nine stories in this debut collection, set mostly in a well-drawn rural South, gorgeously examine loneliness and its companion, longing. Vice has a gift for making the extraordinary plausible, for rendering complex motivations in spare but metaphoric language and searing details. In the opening story, "Tuscaloosa Knights," a lonely young academic wife finds uneasy comfort in the arms of her husband's buddy-cum-fixer on a night when the Klan holds a cross-burning and escapees from a state asylum flee past them in their own white robes. "Chickensnake" depicts a disastrous day on a farm through the eyes of a boy working with his father, while "Mule" concerns a retired vice principal's discovery that he's competing with his wife's deceased first husband in a way he hadn't expected. In "Report from Junction," perhaps the strongest and most terrifying story, a rancher's son is buoyed by hope—and tangled in fear—at the thought of escaping a brutally demanding ranch life through a football scholarship under University of Alabama football icon Bear Bryant. The title story is a surprising tale of corporate espionage in some future time, grounded in the mythos of Bear Bryant, which ends this rich collection on a strange and fitting note of triumph. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

The Ku Klux Klan; a macabre scarecrow; the ghosts of Joseph Stalin and, oxymoronically, Bear Bryant. Such frequently malevolent yet always recognizable characters and scenarios roiling through Vice's stories do much to explain why the term "Southern Gothic" exists in literary criticism and "Upper Midwest Gothic" doesn't. Iconoclastic passions run deeper in the South, where idols are placed on higher pedestals, forcing their guardians to go to greater lengths to defend and protect them. Ergo, the anguish and trauma associated with their downfall become that much more bizarre and devastating. A wily and astute observer, Vice probes such phenomena with the fascination of a little boy holding a sun--catching magnifying glass to an ant; an action that reveals either the patient, thoughtful research scientist or the sociopathic serial killer the boy will one day become. Reading Vice, one becomes deliciously aware that it could go either way, for he limns this rich vein of human passion and contradiction with exquisite timing and nuanced insight. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: River City Publishing; 1st edition (March 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579660754
• ISBN-13: 978-1579660758
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,151,563 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful and worthwhile., December 16, 2005

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fictio) (Hardcover)

Brad Vice, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (University of Georgia, 2005)

I think at this point everyone has heard of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Not because it won the Flannery O'Connor Award last year, but because the award got yanked after it was shown that Vice had plagiarized parts of the book's opening short story, "Tuscaloosa Knights." More's the pity, because it's actually the book's weakest offering. A second allegation of plagiarism has been made for "Report from Junction," another story that comes about halfway through the collection.

None of this is actually relevant to the review, and without getting into a discussion of "fair use" which would take up far more than a thousand words, is here only for purposes of completeness. No one has yet complained that Vice lifted a complete story, whole and unbroken-- only various passages and sentences. And what makes the stories in this collection so good is the way those passages and sentences are strung together. (I have hopes that eventually Brad Vice will turn out looking like the print version of the Evolution Control Committee, the idiocy of this whole thing will go away, and the book will be reprinted.)

The simple truth of the matter is that whether a stray line in story A came from book B by another author or not, Vice has penned a wonderful batch of stories in this debut collection. Most of them are little slices of Southern life, usually Depression-era or not long after. I wondered about halfway through the collection, though, why it had picked up the O'Connor; while Vice's stories are on the whole excellent, they didn't seem quite dark enough to be worthy of bearing Ms. O'Connor's hallowed name. That, of course, changed a couple of pages after I had the thought. The book's three final stories take the collection into places of darkness and despair that it hadn't previously seen.

The title story, especially, is a corker. Set in the slightly-near future, it concerns an auto designer who's obsessed with making a black and white short film (and an amusement park ride) based on the Bear Bryant funeral train. It is obsessed with its own detail, and it treats its characters in very nasty ways. A good man is hard to find, indeed, and when you find him, you may find that you don't want him nearly as much as you thought you did.

I'd strongly recommend going and picking this up at your earliest opportunity, but the University of Georgia recalled all outstanding copies and pulped them. (They were going for as high as a thousand bucks apiece on Amazon, and may still be.) If your library is one of the few holdouts who still has a copy, I'd grab it and read it ASAP, because it's entirely possible that, otherwise, you will never get the chance. Stunning. ****

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If You Read the Book, You'll Understand, April 19, 2007

By 

Kyle Minor "reader" (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (Paperback)

Listen: the book is awesome. A bunch of people who didn't understand the literary strategy of the book got real upset and railroaded the hardcover edition out of print. That was a shame, and the shame was not on Brad Vice. It was a big huge loss, too, because these stories are damn good, and they don't read the same way as some of the sources upon which a couple of them are based.

Brad Vice, by now, ought to be enjoying the rewards good work brings. I hope, at least, he's enjoying the good work itself, as I have been again this week. I give The Bear Bryant Funeral Train my strongest recommendation, and my bookshelves are holding a few spots open for future Brad Vice books.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book of Southern Short Stories...Great Book, March 1, 2006

By 

Big D (Auburn, AL. USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fictio) (Hardcover)

Yes, there is some controversy about this little book, but discerning readers should not let that take away from the brilliance of other stories around which there is no controversy. The chapters on "Chickensnake" and "Mules" are brilliant. Truly brilliant. Others border on brilliance as well. Combined with Bobby Dews' collection of short stories "Legends, Demons and Dreams," you have the best of Southern fiction today. Forget the controversy. Read the book. It's well worth it. So is Bobby Dews' book.