Customer Reviews

Hell at the Breech: A Novel

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In his highly praised short story collection, POACHERS, Alabama native Tom Franklin mined a neglected topic --- the modern South --- for narrative gold. He created vivid, visceral stories of present-day losers and rabble-rousers, and presented them as both regular frustrated humans and red-dirt legends.

Although his follow-up novel, HELL AT THE BREECH, is set more than 100 years in the past, Franklin's sensibility for gritty Southern realism remains in tact and in fact has become one of his defining traits as a regional author. Much like its predecessor, HELL AT THE BREECH refuses to romanticize the South, its inhabitants, or the violence they perpetrate, yet Franklin holds up his male characters as examples and exemplars of various strains of Southern masculinity, examining the morality of bloodshed in all its muscular complexity.

So many things work so well in this novel about a real-life gang war in rural Alabama that it's difficult to know which to praise first or foremost. Franklin's grasp of history is strong and confident; he ably recreates not just the language and the customs of turn-of-the-century Alabama, but also its lost landscape, a terrain that seems foreign at the turn of this century: "The woods were high all around, so green it felt almost cloudy, thrashers noisy in the bracken and sparrows flitting overhead, the ground slashed like paintbrush work with the shadow of pine needles."

Evoked in patient, sculpted sentences, the rough, unforgiving woods --- especially the impenetrable Bear Thicket that separates the city of Oak Grove from the uncivilized agrarian community of Mitcham Beat --- lend the story a sense of menace and mystery, and suggest an ever-changing world that seems impossibly vast. Introducing one of his main characters, a teenager named Mack Burke, Franklin writes that "the earth redefined itself around him, same as it had the day before and the day before that and as far back as his memory went, as if this dawn were no different than any other."

That dawn, however, is different for Mack: it's the first sunlight he sees after becoming a murderer, having accidentally shot a store owner named Arch Bedsole during a botched robbery. Arch was a prominent storeowner in Mitcham Beat, and his murder is locally assumed to be the work of city people trying to exert political power over the poor country farmers. In reaction, a group of Mitcham Beat farmers organize a gang called Hell-at-the-Breech to overthrow the city businessmen who hold liens on every crop in the area. Leading Hell-at-the-Breech is Quincy "Tooch" Bedsole, Arch's cousin and a deeply devious man who takes over Arch's store and indentures Mack to work as a stock boy.

As the Hell-at-the-Breech gang lash out at the farmers who won't join up and the city people who oppose them, Sheriff Billy Waite --- pushing 70 and nearing retirement --- tries to investigate, but finds only farmers too scared or too angry to take the law's side. Because he doesn't take immediate action, the townspeople see him as ineffectual, and because he drinks openly, they see him as a washed-up sot. But for Franklin, Waite's hesitation is a form of levelheaded mercy that few people in the novel possess or even recognize.

Waite's steady lawfulness and Tooch's manipulative lawlessness provide enough friction to ignite the forest between them, but for Franklin they represent nothing as simple as good and evil or right and wrong. HELL AT THE BREECH possesses a more complex morality: Franklin implies that hostility can be a useful tool but becomes evil when it is thoughtless and pointless, when men commit violence for its own sake. Both sides are depicted as righteous in their causes --- the Hell-at-the-Breech gang justified in its own push for independence, the city people merely protecting themselves from a threat --- but their violent actions are morally unpardonable. So many lives are lost, so many homes burned, so many farms destroyed, but nothing is won.

With HELL AT THE BREECH, Franklin lives up to the promise of POACHERS and establishes himself as an imaginative, intelligent, and important Southern writer. More importantly, he looks history dead in the eye and reveals how the Old South became the New South.

--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner

Like many of the reviewers here, I was very impressed with Franklin's story collection Poachers, and especially the novella by the same name which dominated that award-winning collection. Franklin's lean style, and his obvious familiarity with the rural Alabama landscapes he portrays, remind me a little of William Gay's equally-fascinating depictions of rural Tennessee. When I saw that Franklin had a novel coming out based upon a real-life conflict set during late 19th-century Alabama, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. Hell at the Breech did not disappoint.

The novel takes its time setting the scene, and giving the reader a true sense of Mitcham's Beat, a tiny slice of rural Alabama where poor farmers have too much work to do to stop and grieve over something like a dead spouse. Two teenage brothers, Mack and William Burke, sneak out for a night on the town and during a botched robbery, a man is accidentally killed. The victim, Arch Bedsole, is a shop-owner and local politician, and his murder prompts Arch's cousin Tooch Bedsole to form a gang, with blood oaths, who would set matters right in this neck of the woods.

We find out pretty early that the gang, calling themselves "Hell at the Breech", take their group quite seriously. You are either with them or against them, and you don't want to be against them. For obvious reasons, they don't handle rejection well since anyone approached about joining then knows their identity.

Over the course of the novel Franklin skillfully blurs the distinction between good and evil, creating some ambiguity in the reader as the violence escalates. William joins Tooch's group right away, while Mack, who is considered too young, keeps a low profile while working in Tooch's store, torn between his natural curiosity and his fear at learning too much. Lev James, one of the more ruthless of the gang, suffers tragedy at home and at the same time it appears he is about to lose his farm to foreclosure, although he claims to have made the required payment to the ruthless lender who is not about to cut him any breaks. Tooch himself, who starts out hell-bent for revenge for his cousin's unsolved murder, may have some complicity in his death, the cover-up, and may have bent the rules to take over the store. Even the widow, a mid-wife who raised Mack and William Burke, knows a lot more about the goings on at Mitcham's Beat then we are first led to believe. The self-righteos townfolk who comprise the "posse" demonstrate as much bloodlust as the gang they are after. Nothing is ever as black and white as we initially think.

Over the course of the novel, the tension escalates and a monumental conflict looms ahead. I loved the "gun for hire" character of Ardy Fox, whose brutal method for dealing with the lawless gang, under apparent authority from a local judge, reminded me of the ruthless game warden from Poachers. Sheriff Billy Waite is another character very skillfully drawn by Franklin, a fundamentally fair man with a weakness for whiskey, who is trying to make it to retirement in one piece, with a minimum of bloodshed on his hands. As the murders pile up and the Hell at the Breech gang veer further out of control, Waite realizes he is powerless to stop the mob mentality gripping the townpeople, who want quick results.

I read some commentary by the author, in which he revealed that while the conflict depicted in this novel actually occured in Alabama in the 1890's, there are conflicting reports as to certain of the details. After getting bogged down initially in the details of trying to sift through the evidence and get every fact right, a basically impossible task over a century later, Franklin eventually decided to use the known history as his roadmap, and tell the story his way. I am glad he did, as his debut novel is one of the better reads I have come across in a long time. Highly recommended.

This book had been sitting on my bookshelf for over a year since the New York Times had placed it on their year end best of literature list.Finally getting around to reading it, it completely blew me away.Set in rural Alabama in 1897,an aspiring politician is murdered,and his friends form a secret group, Hell at the Breech,to exact revenge on the townpeople they feel were behind it. It's rough, very violent,and deftly captures the feel and time of a place so specifically you can almost feel the cold and smell the woodsap. A brilliant meditation on the evil and good that lies in every mans heart. Highly recommended.

Hell At The Breech is a fiction novel inspired by real historical events. The book is brutal, realistic and very enthralling to read. Before you know it, you'll find yourself completely hooked to this amazing story of revenge and greed. Author Tom Franklin has created a small masterpiece that should not go unoticed.

When a local man living with the poor farmers on the outskirts of Coffeeville is murdered, the common folks gather to form a group they will call Hell-at-the-Breech, a group that will have as a mission to take revenge on the greedy and rich townfolks. These cotton pickers and labourers have very little left to hang on to. As the days passes by, more and more of them are loosing whatever little they do have left to the banks and loaners, many of them even facing eviction.

In the middle of this story are Mack, a poor sixteen year old boy who will have a great role in the upheaval, and Billy Waite, the town's old Sheriff who doesn't know how to handle this sour situation. As the poor prepare to get revenge on the rich, Mack will serve as the eyes and soul of this novel, the boy who sees all but who doesn't say much. Waite, on the other hand, is trying to calm the townsfolk, especially after the gang hits the town and kills a very reputable man.

Hell breaks loose and all best are off as both sides eventually go to battle in order to get revenge and in order to preserve what they think is the right set of laws. This story could have easily gone out of hand, but Tom Franklin weaves a flawless narrative that is very balanced and very intriguing. His characters are never perfect; these are flawed men with dreams and fears who are all awaiting to get something better out of life. His characters are very realistic, a thing that is greatly helped by Franklin's incredible talent at writing dialogue.

A great book with great characters and with a great plot is a winner in my book. Read this one and I'm sure you won't be sorry. This is one book that is bound for greatness.

Fellow readers have been telling me for awhile that I must read Tom Franklin. So, I picked up Hell at the Breech on their suggestions. It is great though a little on the violent side, but then the South in the late 1800's was like that ( maybe still is ? ). The story is about a valiant though flawed sheriff and some real ner' do wells in a small Alabama town who form a Klan type organization to wreak havoc on the country side. Wonderful characters abound.

The story is gripping, but to me the outstanding aspect of the book is Franklin's way with words. His prose is in many places more like poetry. This for me was one of those books that made me want to meet the author to see what kind of a person could write so excellently.

About as Five Star as they get

There are enough reviews already that tell what the book is about. I just want to say it is darn good writing and a great book. We will hear more and more about Tom.

for good measure
Whoa, this is a good one. Two young brothers in 1897 go off to rob a guy in order to get enough money to pay for the services of a local whore. A revolver is accidentally fired, the man being robbed dies - and he turns out to be a local merchant and politician. The boys flee and swear each other to silence.
Here's where the situation really turns sticky, the story being based on a tale Tom Franklin, the author, heard while growing up in Dickinson, Alabama, a one-horse town where he grew up amid faith-healings and exorcisms. The dead man's cousin, Tooch Bedsole, accused men from a neighboring town of the `murder,' and rounds up a posse (lynch mob would be a word that might occur to some) to seek revenge. The descriptions of the violence, the repercussions of what started as a stupid caper, are horrific and graphically portrayed - this is not a book to read aloud in the drawing room of your great aunt! But don't despair and think it's all just gratuitous sensationalism: there's a beautiful surprise twist at the end.

...sometimes in the name of 'justice'. Tom Franklin's first novel is set in 1897-98 rural Alabama, and is based on historical events surrounding a gang that called itself Hell at the Breech. Formed ostensibly to avenge the murder of the brother of its founder, the gang's activities quickly spread beyond the boundaries of justice and revenge, and into more and more violence - committed for the sake of greed, and, sometimes, for its own sake.

The strengths that drive this work are Franklin's character building, as well as his incredible talent for placing the reader right smack-dab in the middle of the setting. None of the folks of populate this novel are clearly, completely good or bad - all of the good ones have their 'warts', and all (well, at least some...) of the bad ones have at least one redeeming characteristic. Many of the men who fight on the side of the gang are doing so out of what they see as honorable reasons - and many others are forced into supporting them on threat of death. It's a timeless story of the evil that can be done in the name of justice - one that can shed a lot of light on many of the events of our own time. It should be widely read for that reason alone.

Franklin is an amazingly talented writer - his short story collection POACHERS is witness to this fact. I think I could have easily enjoyed this novel much more if it weren't for the fact that he seems to be preoccupied - perhaps fascinated is more correct - with the almost unbearably gruesome details in the story. Telling a tale such as this is naturally going to involve a lot of violence - the men on both sides of the fight lived and breathed it every day - but there were too many instances in the book that seemed to dwell overly long on what amounted to literary 'close-ups'. American television seems to have 'caught up' with popular film trends in the last few years - shows like 'CSI' and its offshoot, 'CSI - Miami' are replete with cringe-inducing close-ups showing bullets and knives slicing into human flesh. Franklin is a better writer than this - he shouldn't feel the need to cram this sort of thing into an otherwise stunning debut.

If you took Cormac McCarthy's bloody masterpiece, "Blood Meridian", moved it from the southern border lands to Alabama and gave it a soul, it would come out looking a lot like Tom Franklin's "Hell in the Breech," a grisly but beautifully poignant tale of an obscure slice of American history, The Mitcham Beat "war" at the close of the 19th century.

Having first read Tom Franklin's short story, "Poachers," in Otto Penzler's "The Best American Noir of the Century," I had to find more of this steamy and brutal southern prose - a delicious southern scramble of Faulkner style and James Lee Burke readability. In the author's rendering, young orphan Mack Burke, with his older brother William, accidently kills the local storekeeper in a clumsy kids' play disguised as robbery, setting off an unanticipated chain of events. Given what I suspect are scant details of the feud that set dirt-poor sharecroppers and common thugs against the only slightly better off gentry, it's hard to determine how closely Franklin stays to the facts - but not to worry. This is a fascinating yarn rich with bleak background of a South still struggling to recover from the Civil War; bitter, unfathomably poor, and barely better off than the slaves that were emancipated three decades before. Franklin fills this desperate landscape of cotton fields and tin-roofed shacks with a terrifically rich cast: the two unfortunate brothers, their adopted grandmother - the almost supernaturally wise and prescient "grandma" Bates, the well meaning but aging sheriff Billy Waite, and a rogues gallery of country villains, including Virgil "Tooch" Bedsole, cousin of the murdered man and bent on revenge against the unknown killer. The tension is palpable as suspense builds at a slow but steady and intriguing pace through the first half of the book, paying off in an adrenaline-charged second half that cuts and weaves through treachery, deceit, unmitigated violence and cruelty only slightly blunted with the occasional act of black humor and valor.

This is historical fiction the way it should be written - brilliant prose illuminating a fascinating niche of unvarnished American culture, told though the dialog of real, authentically flawed characters. Tom Franklin has the rare combination of a historian's eye for detail and a poet's skill in turning a phrase and painting rich portraits in prose. Bravo.

It was nice to see Tom Franklin finally kill some people after brutally murdering mostly animals throughout the duration of his debut story collection, Poachers (not that he escapes that, as seen by the very first chapter). Those deaths are the most memorable parts of the book not only because they're perfect examples of condensed violence, but because as the characters begin to fall, the power shifts from side to side. Now, I realize that's fairly obvious, but Franklin's accomplishment of embodying both numerical and emotional importance in each character deserves to be acknowledged. Nobody falls in this story without a purpose.

The story itself, beyond the characters in it, is a highly fictionalized account of an actual occurrence. Nobody complained that Julius Caesar was terribly slanted by Shakespeare's rendition of the end of his days, and I don't think anyone should be lodging complaints about this story, either. Tooch Bedsole and Billy Waite were real people in the real Mitcham Beat battle, yes, but they weren't how they are portrayed in Franklin's novel. I don't know anything about historical fiction, but I'm guessing my constraints are a bit looser than most people's (I also once described creative non-fiction as being "a story that's kind of true," which I'm sure is terribly wrong and quite dumb to say).

I don't consider the fictionalization of the story to be a problem because I walked into the novel with both an expectation for fiction and a mental capacity consisting of base-level of cognitive abilities. With such efficient prose and authentic people, I think it'd be hard to dislike the book from at least a literary point of view. I'm amazed by how lean Franklin's fiction is at all times. His wife's poet-eye must have either rubbed off on him or helped him greatly, as there are no wasted words here. Or perhaps he's just lazy, as the writing doesn't work any harder than it has to. Either way, it's impressive.

As far as liking or disliking the novel beyond its literary merits, there's no reason why this shouldn't appeal to anyone (who can handle the violence). It's got devices and symbolism and other qualities of fine literature, but there's enough mystery to keep the pages turning, too. While the first two-thirds of the book are able to be put down (not for good, of course), the last third is not: all the ends come together, snaking back together at the last minute. Hell At the Breech is a fine movement into the longform, and while I don't prefer it to Poachers, it's just as well-written and just as worthy of being read.