Twilight (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Teenage siblings Corrie and Kenneth Tyler suspect they've been ripped off by the town undertaker, but what they discover in Gay's resplendently dark third novel is much more sinister than either imagined. After their bootlegger father is buried in smalltown 1951 Tennessee, Kenneth sees undertaker Fenton Breece remove an item from the grave. The siblings dig up their father's grave, among others, and uncover unsettling evidence of Fenton's necrophilia. Corrie cooks up a blackmail plot and enlists Kenneth to steal Fenton's briefcase, which contains, as Kenneth and Corrie soon find out, photos depicting Fenton "capering gleefully" with corpses. Blackmail material in hand, Corrie demands $15,000 from Fenton, and Fenton hires local psychopath Granville Sutter to muzzle—by whatever means necessary—the Tylers and get back the photos. A violent run-in with Sutter ends with Corrie's death, and Kenneth runs off to the Harrikin, a remote rural area inhabited by the eccentric and the creepy, leaving Fenton to cavort with Corrie's corpse. Gay (The Long Home) fills the book with haunting imagery and shocking, morbid and (surprisingly) hopeful turns as twisted justice gets meted out. Language lovers who are not faint of heart won't want to miss this one. (Oct. 20)
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From The Washington Post

Corrie and Kenneth Tyler find their worst suspicions confirmed when they dig up the corpse of their bootlegger father. They're hoping to prove that undertaker Fenton Breece cheated them out of an $800 steel vault. But the real story is what else they discover: a grisly pattern of mutilated corpses. In one coffin, "an old woman shared her resting place with a young man who'd had his throat straightrazored, and he lay humped athwart her thighs as they lay arm in arm in eternal debauchery."

While such discoveries might mark a lesser book's grim denouement -- the horrible truth finally revealed -- William Gay's twisted and tantalizing third novel successfully torques screws already tight from the start. Stolen photographs reveal further atrocities; the siblings decide to blackmail the undertaker; and Breece in turn enlists the aid of Granville Sutter, a remorseless killer, to retrieve the damning evidence.

Then things take a bad turn.

Twilight is almost textbook Southern Gothic, with its elements of the grotesque and perverse, its psychological extremes and its fixations on violence and sex. Gay successfully uses this form's ability to unsettle readers, forcing them to see anew darker aspects of humanity. When Breece positions an adored corpse for an afternoon of listening to radio shows, for example, the bleak mimicry of domesticity may leave readers unsure whether to chuckle or flinch.

But perhaps more interesting are Gay's other structural and stylistic choices. Previewing the full story in an italicized flash-forward at the novel's opening, he defuses conventional tactics of suspense but successfully refocuses readers' attentions on greater concerns, especially later, when violence forces the Tyler boy to flee into a wasteland, "eerie and strange, all black shadow and silver light." The narrative slows to ruminate on such themes as corrupted innocence, the reckless randomness of life and the inevitable, eternal nature of death -- all part of the book's deterministic bent toward "vindictive fate."

Gay's daring flirtation with myth, fairy tale and fable serves similar purposes. At one point, Sutter is likened to "some baleful god remonstrating with a world he'd created that would not do his bidding." Elsewhere, he dons a grandmother's outfit -- a big bad wolf licking his lips as he awaits his prey. By alluding to such forms even as he mixes menace and levity, Gay suggests some crucial revelation -- or perhaps dark divination -- about the pervasive nature of evil.

By Twilight's close, this netherworld struggle offers little in the way of resolution or redemption -- only respite beside a much longer road ahead. And no moral closes this dark fable, except maybe this: There's a meanness in the world, and maybe in ourselves, and we'd better watch out for both.

Reviewed by Art Taylor
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: MacAdam Cage (October 20, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596920580
• ISBN-13: 978-1596920583
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #412,486 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars EVIL, EVIL EVIL...., March 12, 2008

By	Robert L. James "modern fiction hag" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Twilight (Paperback)

Called a `Southern Gothic' by critics and reviewers, I got interested in this dark tale by Stephen King. He has a column on the last page of Entertainment Weekly (someone gave me a gift subscription and admittedly I have enjoyed this guilty pleasure) He is in the there about once every 3rd week or so, and in this issue he had a year end `Best Of' list. TWILIGHT was his book of the year so I had to have it. Now after reading this excellent book, I respect Mr. King even more for his depth in reading. William Gay himself describes this story as a modern Hansel and Gretel...which it is, but no fairy tale, as horrifying as they could be, ever read like this. Gay has an eloquent writing style that wraps you in his world right off the bat. (I just ordered another book of his) This tale of good and evil turns into a lengthy cat and mouse chase thru the rural sticks of Tennessee in the 1950's, and we feel the adrenaline of one who is being chased for much of the book. The story deals with a brother and sister that find out some most disturbing facts about the local funeral director. They steal a briefcase from him and discover some incriminating photos which they try to blackmail him with. This backfires when he hires a monstrous ex-con to `take care' of his problem. No more from me. If you like an edge of your seat kind of read....then, by all means....scare yourself silly with this terrifying and beautifully written Southern Gothic.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars deep in the tall pineys..., December 27, 2006

By	Larry L. Looney (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

First of all - when you name a thing, it can somehow limit the scope of that thing. For instance, when William Gay's writing is labeled `Southern gothic' by reviewers, it's possible that a potential reader who has never particularly appreciated that genre might defer experiencing what could very well be a lifechanging literary experience. Know this: nobody writes like William Gay - and in the case of his work, it's more an instance of the genre being absolutely exploded by the expansiveness and reach of the art.

In TWILIGHT, Gay lays out what in the hands of most other writers would be a simple tale of good-versus-evil. A brother and sister suspect that the local undertaker has cheated them in the burial of their father - a steel vault that should have surrounded his casket is, when they dig it up, missing. Following her hunches, Corrie Tyler convinces her brother Kenneth to join her in exhuming other deceased citizens of their rural Tennessee town - and what they find exceeds her wildest grim imaginings. The undertaker, one Fenton Breece, has apparently made a practice of desecrating - oftentimes obscenely - the bodies of the departed entrusted to his benevolent care. Corrie is determined that Breece should pay for what he did to their daddy - and Kenneth manages to purloin a bit of evidence - a bundle of...shall we say...incriminating photographs - from the trunk of the grim digger's car that the two believe should convince him to cough up a hearty (in the day) bit of cash, in reparation and punishment.

Breece, however, disagrees - and while he consents to Corrie's proffered bargain, he has other plans in mind for the siblings. He enlists one Granville Sutter - a local convicted murder and all-around doer of evil deeds - to retrieve the evidence and silence the brother and sister. What ensues is a wild ride, both for the protagonists and the reader. Sutter is easily the most evil character that Gay has thus far created - and, I would venture, one of the vilest one is likely to come across in literature of any age. He thinks nothing of killing - be it man, woman, child or beast - and he does so on a semi-regular basis, whenever it seems to him that killing is required. He pursues Kenneth Tyler into, through and out of the Harrikin - an area of abandoned mines, concealed shafts offering a deadly drop to a quick end for the unsuspecting traveler, ghost towns, dilapidated shacks populated by some truly unique, unforgettable characters, abandoned mansions, and unfettered overgrowth that would stymie even the most seasoned woodsman. At one point, Kenneth muses that in the Harrikin even a compass would swing to some false true north of the wilderness' own devising. Many people - and farm animals - have wandered in and never come out.

The situations and people that Kenneth encounters in his flight from Sutter and toward justice are not placed in the story on a whim - each incident, each meeting awakens something new in the boy, something that is vital to his growth as a human being, something that encourages him to cling desperately to everything that makes his humanity real. Many people don't experience these sorts of things at this intensity over the course of their entire life - imagine the impact on a person who goes through them in the course of a few days or weeks. That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

Gay knows the area in which his books are set - and his characters - like the back of his hand, and he respects them both very deeply. The eccentricities of the land and the people who try to survive on it are played out to the fullest - and none of it ever comes across as caricature or condescension. His writing style always wraps me up as if I've been somehow transported to another world - another reviewer below likened reading William Gay to taking a drug, and I have to agree that's an apt description. This story is as dark as dark can be (I certainly must say), but once I started it I couldn't put it down. There is evil and violence here - but there is also wisdom and redemption and hope, so don't be too afraid. I've read everything he's published more than a few times, and I never tire of his work - give me more, please, doc...

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wow, March 5, 2008

By	John Bowes (Oxford, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Twilight (Paperback)

Perverse, cruel, and depraved describe the bad guys. Crazy,too. And the regular people are hard scrabble folks, who try to do the right things, despite a lot of apathetic observers. Gay can write. The pages keep turning. The midnight oil burns. I'm looking for his other books.