Set in the Missouri hill country, Death of Sweet Mister presents one eventful summer in the life of Shug, a friendless, overweight 13-year-old living with his mother, Glenda in the caretaker's cottage at the local cemetery. Glenda flirts incessantly, even with her son, who is becoming increasingly aware of her charms. Glenda's husband, Red (who may or may not be Shug's father), comes and goes, bringing money occasionally and strife a lot more often. This summer Red is training Shug in the family business, using the juvenile without a record to perform the burglaries that are getting too risky for Red himself. Shug's efforts to protect his mother from Red, from other admirers, and from her own rash decisions come to a head one hot summer night
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
'With The Death of Sweet Mister, Danial Woodrell has written his masterpiece - spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart." - Dennis Lehane; "A dark, disturbing beauty of a story...Woodrell throws down sentences that will leave you amazed." - Charles Frazier; "I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece - spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart." - Dennis Lehane; "Daniel Woodrell's The Death of Sweet Mister is nakedly honest, unsettling, pitch perfect, and uniquely American. Put it on the shelf alongside Faulkner, Jim Thompson, and Cormac McCarthy. With this one, Mr. Woodrell has earned himself a piece of immortality." - George P. Pelecanos; "Woodrell is one of the most intense and accomplished practitioners since Jim Thompson. He has achieved a near mastery of style as language, plot, characterization and theme mesh with a seamless power" - NY Times Book Review; "Woodrell's five books to date have had writers as diverse as James Ellroy, Barry Gifford, James Crumley, Carl Hiaasen and E Annie Proulx clearing their throats to sing his praises. Despite its often unspeakably bleak outlook, Tomato Red is a beautiful and often very funny book, full of raw poetry, the small mean lives of people living on the bloody rim of things described in prose that is brilliant and original, Woodrell being better than anyone at the vernacular of desperation, revenge and redemption, with dialogue as good as anything in Elmore Leonard and a skewed unpredictability reminiscent of Harry Crews. Read it and weep." - Uncut; "At a time when the two dominant strands of male American fiction to emerge in the last couple of decades - contemporary noir and dirty realism - have largely lapsed into self-parody, a writer from the Ozark mountains of Missouri has come along to resuscitate them both. From its farcical beginning to the awful, stupid tragedy of its denouement, this is a flat-out marvellous book. Rooted in the purest noir tradition of the Fifties, it is nevertheless great literary fiction. Like a murder ballad or a prison-yard blues, Tomato Red is written in the kind of vernacular poetry you want to read and learn by heart." - The Independent; "Tomato Red is one of the great American noir novels of the decade... a wonderfully funny and tragic tale of blighted white trash dreams, a country noir every bit as sharp and twisted as the best of Jim Thompson or Charles Williams...what Daniel Woodrell's come back with are some of the finest, toughest books in American fiction today." - Time Out
About the Author
Dan Woodrell comes from a long line of Ozarkers that stretch back before the Civil War. A high school dropout he joined the marine corps at 17. The military and he saw things differently. A period of post military drifting ended up at the University of Kansas and a Michener fellowship at the Iowa Writers School, where he was definitely the odd man out. His has written six other novels published by No Exit, Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, The Ones You Do, the civil war novel, Woe to Live On, filmed by Ang Lee as Ride with the Devil, Give Us A Kiss and Tomato Red. He lives in West Plains, Missouri with his wife, the writer, Katie Estill
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent but not for the faint hearted,
By
This review is from: Death of Sweet Mister (Paperback)
This is about as dark as they come. Wonderfully written by a bloke who has an amazing ability to use the language. The story of a boy growing up on the wrong side of the tracks..violent father, uneducated family, drugs, alcohol, crime, sexual abuse. You name it.
However be warned that the book bites. It is very powerful with a surprising but sadly inevitable end. Read it if you dare, and think about following up all the author's books. I think he is underappreciated
5.0 out of 5 stars
In Every Southern High School...,
By
This review is from: Death of Sweet Mister (Paperback)
In every southern high school--or at least, the ones I and the people I grew up around went to--there was always a small cadre of very poor rural kids who all knew each other and stuck close together. And, in that pack, there was always a brother and sister duo about whom whispers were traded. Bad whispers.
This book explores the dysfunction of Rural Southern Family, and does so with an insider's knowledge. Mr. Woodrell, who I believe grew up far enough south to "get it," takes an unblinking look at the trial of Shug Akins, his Mama Glenda and his father? stepfather? Red. Glenda's extramarital suitor also makes appearances. Glenda is an oversexed dim bulb, Red a violent, drug-addled, sociopathic redneck. What Woodrell allows us to look into is the humorless thought processes of a pubescent boy raised in that environment. It may be too much, but Shug reminded me a lot of Huckleberry Finn: a boy raised so hard and so wild that he was simply making his way without a whole lot of feeling going on. He has been made into a hard wall and the world merely bounces off of him, save for the comforts offered by his mother, when she is in the mood to pay attention to him at all. The emotional incest and concomitant jealousy in the story are spot-on, and when I realized where the last three pages were headed, I literally jumped, startled, as I sat reading at the breakfast table. Woodrell chose to allow the innuendo to come to fruition, and it was hard to read. The protagonist's protective hardness becomes needy darkness just before the curtain falls. A recommended read.
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