Customer Reviews

The Death of Sweet Mister

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Having read and admired several of Daniel Woodrell's books, I was very pleased to see that this one had been released.

As with the previous "Tomato Red", this one is well-written and wondrous in the simple, unadorned tone of the narration. However both of these books are difficult to gush over.

These are dark gems. And they lack the allure that the common reader expects.

When we are moved to feel joy or sorrow by an author, we have no trouble considering that genius is involved. With Woodrell though, the emotions are more complex. And he can stir up things which we might prefer to have left hidden and forgotten.

This is definitely genius. Especially when someone such as Woodrell accomplishes this with a subtlety that is remarkably profound.

In this book, we are given the sad story of thirteen-year-old, overweight Shug Atkins. His is about the furthest thing from an "aw shucks" coming-of-age tale you can get.

Shug and his mother Glenda live in a shack on the grounds of the cemetery they maintain. Here they are plagued by the abusive Red. Red may or may not be Shug's biological father -- he probably isn't but this has never been made clear to Shug. Despite that, Red acts the father role and displays some of the most despicable ways possible for a grown man -- he is definitely an inappropriate role model.

Glenda has always relied on her looks even though they haven't gotten her very far. She's about little more than sex and as age advances has little in her life but maintaining an anaesthetic level of drunkenness. Far from being a perfect mother, she is still Shug's most likely ally -- a relationship that has all the possibilities for the perverse one can imagine.

Shug's world is full of dysfunction. He has been exposed to drug and alcohol abuse, hardened criminality, illicit sexual behavior and all manner of wickedness. But he doesn't know any better. And in the course of this novel, things go from bad to worse. In the end, the situation is beyond help.

Where "Tomato Red" impressed me with a story of what tragedy might happen when people fail to follow society's norms, this book shows what happens to people who live by the norms and meet tragedy by tangling with people who do not play by those rules.

I felt stunned after reading this book. Honestly. I sat and thought about it and couldn't shake it. It was like having heard a bomb go off nearby -- too close to feel secure.

This is certainly a remarkable book.

Have you ever truly, physically "ached" with pity? When I closed "Death of Sweet Mister," I shut my eyes and hoped to forget Shugg Akins, but knew I never would. I just sat there dry-eyed and hollow. This is quite a testament to author Daniel Woodrell's skill, but at a price I'm not certain I wanted to pay.

Shugg aka "Morris" aka Sweet Mister is fat and thirteen, a bit of an outcast with his peers (because he's fat? poor? at the bottom of the poor white trash social scale? -- we don't know.) Shugg, our narrator is bright, quick, and a pragmatist through and through. He goes along to get along. His only champion is his mother Glenda, a pretty lady whose looks didn't get her very far, whose only weapons are persistent sensuousness and an ever-present silver thermos containing rum-laced "tea." Shugg's nominal father (probably not) is Red Akins, a cruel, brutal, truly evil man whose purpose in life is drinking, drugging and make certain Shugg and Glenda's lives were spent in abject humiliation. Red is not smart, but he is a shrewd and cunning, formidable foe. "Foe" is the wrong word for Red; you'd no more oppose him than an evil force of nature. I once read of an Australian Wandering Spider, one of the most venomous spiders in the world who is so aggressive that if you try to kill him, say with a broom, he climbs right up the broom handle and goes after you, and isn't satisfied with one bite--he keeps on biting till he's through. Red is a subhuman Wandering Spider.

Red and his pal Basil drag Shugg with them to steal drugs from terminally ill people and doctors' offices, the theory being if Shugg gets caught, as a juvenile, he will only be reprimanded. Shugg complies in his sheer terror of Red, and descriptions of this overweight, clumsy boy trying to be a second story man are both pathetic and ironically funny. What Shugg lacks in physical aptitude, he makes up for in clever quick wittedness far beyond anything Red would understand.

When Glenda has a torrid affair with a man who has a green T-Bird, the inexorable tragedy must play itself out. Everyone is in place: murderous Red, loyal Basil, and Shugg who has been taught to love his mother too much and knows he has not a song, but a scream, in his heart. Glenda's Sweet Mister is gone.

Woodrell is powerful, concise and unsparing. "Death of Sweet Mister'" is compelling, well-written, but not for everyone. With a tragedy, there are no alternate endings.

-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

of incest. I knew he'd finally get to it and wow!- he does it with such smooth and seamless prose and just the right amount of tension that he rivals James M. Caine's renderings on such a shadowy subject. As with previous works, Woodrell proves he's a writer's writer with this dark portrait (reminds one of Faulkner's Sanctuary) of southern culture on the skids. Woodrell's style is so economical and subtle that the tension build-up throughout the novel doesn't hit until the final scenes and then it hits you right between the eyes, sharp and swift,like you're a frog being gigged by some redneck, hillbilly swilling cheap beer and looking for trouble beneath a pale moon.

Daniel Woodrell's last novel, Tomato Red, was about classism experienced by poor whites in the author's native Missouri Ozarks. Woodrell's latest, his seventh novel, The Death of Sweet Mister, has a tighter focus--more psychological, less sociological--that yields a jewel of a literary noir: Think of Oedipus Rex set in the backcountry, seasoned with a bit of James Ellroy. This is not an easy story to tell. Themes about incest among poor whites can easily lapse into the degrading stereotypes of genetic insufficiency attacked in Jim Goad's The Redneck Manifesto, and elsewhere. No, Woodrell has all the compassion for his characters that any literary master knows they need to live on the page. Although excellent, be warned, however, this is one of those "and they didn't live happily ever after" tales.

With Shuggie Akins, a obese, lonely, thirteen-year-old adrift among adult misfits, Woodrell again creates a first-person voice that convinces: The people, the place come alive wholly from inside--moreover, because of--Shuggie's language: "Our house looked as if it had been painted with jumbo crayons by a kid with wild hands who enjoyed bright colors but lost interest fast." Inventive linguistic genius of this sort goes on page after page and if at first a surfeit of these gems seems to slow the reading, don't worry: The voice creeps up on you and stays as an agreeable companion. Like a "Thunderbird (that) seemed to instantly comb the bumps from the road ahead to keep the ride always gentle," The Death of Sweet Mister reads smoothly.

At first, Shuggie's story seems about the rite of passage a teenage boy takes to manhood. But opportunities for Shuggie to bond with his petty criminal and abusive dad, Red, seem invariably to have two outcomes: stupefying disillusionment or, worse, schooling for a desperate life of crime. A fishing outing with Dad ends when Shuggie sent to wade in the river sees Red and girlfriend Patty engage in some "nasty clutching" inside the truck cab. And Shuggie's legal standing as a juvenile makes him Red's pawn for a series of burglaries to steal prescribed narcotics from the sick and doctors' offices.

Woodrell's fitting metaphorical logic for this tale of doom makes Shuggie and Mom Glenda the working caretakers of a cemetery. Shuggie steals "dope" from the sick, who later end up in his "bone orchard." With no real role models to make his transition to manhood a success, Shuggie falls into misdeeds on his own. We see character corruption, we see "the death of Sweet Mister"--Glenda's nickname for the son whose failed male bonding appears to seal his Oedipal fate.

Compared to Tomato Red, The Death of Sweet Mister is a darker tale because the characters do not dream a better life for them exists elsewhere. If the dream of escape kept characters in Tomato Red moving, for Shuggie, it's life with no exit. His only dream of another place, oddly enough, is Norway because that is where Vikings live. Certainly he was thinking of violent, berserkr Vikings, the sort that he already, in his own way, knew. When Shuggie grasps what cards life has dealt him, he lets out a primal scream for things held back. And then he goes about greeting the doom that is, at once, as inevitable as the cemetery where he and his mom live.

This book is excellent. A short book and a quick read, it packs a wallop. Woodrell is good, but this book was a real surprise. One of the best books I've read in a while.

"The Death of Sweet Mister" is one of the best books I've read this year. It's the dark story of one Shug Akins (whose real name is Morris), a fat thirteen-year-old boy with a ditzy, tartish mother and a reprehensible, low-life stepfather named Red who forces Shug to steal drugs for him. They live in a cemetery. These are fascinating characters and, even though abusive fathers or stepfathers are overdone as a subject for fiction, Daniel Woodrell has a unique and original approach to this subject matter. Unlike some current writers, he can convey much in a few (very interesting) words. "The Death of Sweet Mister" is the first book I've read by Daniel Woodrell, and I plan to seek out his other books. I highly recommend it for the serious reader interested in current American literature. It gives you a chance to see how good it can be.

My first impulse when finishing Daniel Woodrell's disturbing yet exceptionally written book was to take a shower. Told from the point of view of a overweight thirteen year old Ozark boy who with his flirtatious Mother and mean spirited and violent Father barely stay afloat in the muck of poverty.A short small book at under two hundred pages it races like a freight train towards a tragic and unforgettable conclusion than resonates even stronger because of the choice of his narrator.Woodrell offers no easy answers or solutions, but instead paints a sometimes hilarious, but more often upsetting depiction of desperate lives pushed to severe and drastic measures. Lives that by the end of the novel, converge like a modern day spin on a classic Shakespearean or Greek tragedy.

...and the colors on Daniel Woodrell's palette are dark ones. The characters in this novel spring to life before our mind's eye -- at once outrageous in their eccentricities and completely believable in their human frailties. Woodrell has an earlier novel that bears the subtitle 'a country noir' -- and that's a perfectly coined description for this work as well. These characters are bottom-feeders and cast-offs, doing what they can -- often out of sheer desperation -- to survive and scramble even a step or two up the perceived ladder of success. God help anyone who gets in their way.

'Sweet Mister' of the title is an overweight thirteen year-old boy. He is being raised by his continuously-drunk mother, Glenda, and her brutal, short-fused husband, Red. Red's parental connection to Sweet Mister is dubious at best -- the boy's mother alludes often and not-so-subtly to another, earlier man in her life, most likely the boy's father. She dotes on the boy -- she flaunts her overt sexuality at him in extremely inappropriate ways -- and this further aggrivates Red's feelings of jealousy toward the boy. Glenda's overly sexual posturing toward her son is most likely born out of her frustration in her relationship with Red -- a cruel man who claims her sexually when his needs arise, then tosses her aside to consort with whatever woman he fancies at the moment.

Red and his slimy buddy Basil -- his partner in a series of increasingly squalid and violent petty crimes -- draw the boy into their schemes, using him more and more overtly as the plot progresses. The tension in the story builds and builds with the power and implied danger of an old neglected boiler -- something has to give, and it does.

Woodrell has done his homework. I'm not sure where he calls home, but one thing is certain -- he's spent some time around characters like these, and he has learned to endow them with incredibly authentic voices and life-patterns. He knows them well -- and he creates them with vitality and looses them into this story with respect, allowing them to act out their parts in a manner true to themselves and to their situation.

It's not a pretty story -- but it's a gripping, well-written one, and VERY hard to put down. Without resorting to cheap stereotypes, the author has created an amazingly cinematic work here. I see Angelina Jolie as a perfectly sultry Brenda, Michael Rooker as the steaming Red, and Billy Bob Thornton as the weasely Basil. Let the filming begin...I think Billy Bob's directorial touches would be nice here also.

I suggest after reading this book that you take a drive out into the countryside, find a lonely, unlit dirt road, and get out of your car. See if you don't find yourself looking over your shoulder, missing the comfort of the city lights. They don't call it 'country dark' out there for nothing...

Mr. Daniel Woodrell's novel, "The Death Of Sweet Mister", continues a long tradition of tragic stories set in the poor, rural, and seemingly hidden places in this country. The settings for these tales often seem set deep in forests and mountains, and are only vaguely attached to familiar names found on maps. These locales exist on the fringe, where roads are dirt, neighbors distant. Perhaps it is the isolation that nourishes the behavior found in this story. The ease with which accountability can be shaken off certainly is a catalyst. These books also hold a certain mystique. As long as there are great writers penning the tales, there seems to be an audience.

There is not much to like about any of the characters in this book. They do not like themselves, and they use others primarily for exploitation. Exploitation that ranges from the familiar to the taboo is ever present. The character, who is in the title of this story, is subject to a variety of abuses he either only sees, or is personally the victim of. He is a young man throughout the book, however he ages rapidly as what he witnesses dehumanizes him.

Many familiar characters are here, the abusive stepfather, the mother as victim, abuse, drugs, and a void of any reference point for normal behavior. The difference is that this time the tragedy falls on those you do not expect, and their fates serve to change a young man's mind and behavior the way cancer would rot a mind. His behavior transforms from that of a victim, to being an imitator, to a betrayer and finally a controller of the unlikeliest of people.

I enjoyed the book even though there was nothing redeeming about a single person in the story. The author managed to take a topic, and remove it from the cliché, and present readers with a new view. This is the first book I have read by this writer; it most certainly will not be the last.

THE DEATH OF SWEET MISTER

I will never ever forget this book. It's ranked in the category of the BEST books I've ever read albeit disturbing, sad, harsh, full of slime-ball characters you would never want to really meet. But I fell in love with thirteen year old Mr. Shuggie Akins.

Shuggie, his mom, Glenda, and his dad, Red, live in a cemetery. Shuggie and Glenda are employed as the caretakers. Red is an alcoholic/druggie and petty thief by trade. Red may or may not be Shuggie's biological father, but everyone tippy-toes around that subject. Red is mean and cruel by nature and delights in belittling Shuggie and anyone else who gets in his way. Shuggie, being overweight, is Red's constant target for jokes and his hot temper. Red comments to Shuggie, "When I say fatso, daddy-o, I'm talkin' to you, dig? Ain't you noticed you're fatter'n s**t?". Red belittles Glenda to Shug and even takes Shuggie out with him when he dates other women. Red is a true role model for a young man!!

Red and his friend Basil use Shuggie to score drugs for them, having Shuggie break into homes of the terminally ill and steal all the drugs he can, while the two grown men wait in the get-away car. Shuggie knows better than to cross Red. He starts to look forward to these nights doing 'men stuff'.

Glenda, while loving her Sweet Mister Shugg, is hooked on her 'tea' and is in a constant alcoholic daze. She is beautiful and turns men's heads everywhere she goes. Unfortunately, she is not too bright and uses her beauty and sexuality to get through her days. She even takes things a step too far and teases her own son, Shuggie, only to dance away leaving him confused and bewildered. Glenda tries to stand up to Red when he is being physically or emotionally cruel to Shug, but can never stop him from hurting her boy. She can only sexually entice Red to stop his constant torture on Shuggie.

Shuggie is heavy, lonely, pathetic and knows no other life than the one he has with the brutal Red. He is turning into a criminal through no fault of his own. He is a caring and loving child, but has no direction in his life. What will become of Shuggie? Will he lead a life of crime? Will he escape into a better atmosphere, one full of love and normalcy, especially after Glenda starts to have a love affair with Jimmy Vin Pearce, who seems to be a better father figure? Read this book and find out. Follow the misadventures of Shuggie as he tries to make it through each day, working in the cemetery, breaking and entering, relying on food to help with his loneliness. Cheer Shuggie on as he tries to outsmart Red and keep out of the way of his sharp tongue and fast fists. Feel badly for Shuggie as he desperately tries to keep Glenda away from her tea and get her away from the abusive Red. Will Shug's life take a turn for the better?

Woodrell writes with such flair and beauty -- "The river had become a place of comfort to me. Some waves jumped high, past the chin to the mouth, and I tasted the river and it tasted about right". Or -- "The weather had gotten into a perfect mood. The heat felt just right in a T-shirt". And -- "Patty looked like a bug bite compared to Glenda. They got awful familiar in front of me. When they broke from the clinch Red called me to him with a hand wave. He patted my back as if he did not know I hated him".

Daniel Woodrell takes on many difficult subjects -- abuse, sex, drugs, incest, robbery, and wraps them all into one pretty package that you, the reader, cannot wait to unwrap and enjoy. This is one heck of a book about Sweet Mister Shuggie and everything he has encountered in his short life span. He is a character that I loved and felt pity for, cheered for, cried for, wanting to bring him home and set him in the right direction in life. He is strong, brave, witty, caring, yet underneath it all, he is a product of his environment and at times he scared me. He is a character I will NEVER forget and I highly recommend you meet him for yourself.

Thank you.

Pam