Customer Reviews

Twilight

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

He felt remote, utterly alone. With the cool earth against his back he awoke sometime in his second night and he could feel the earth wheeling on its mitred course through eternity. Here the sky was clear and so strewn with stars there seemed no darkness between them but simply a vast phantasmagoria of light. Weak with hunger, he watched loom out of the night strange gaudy constellations like great wheels rolling toward him and turning endless in the void as if here in the Harrikin even the heavens were ancient and strange. They seemed to alter night to night as if the universe itself was still in flux. Once a shower of falling stars that seemed to have fallen prey to some celestial epidemic but instead of them showering around him he felt the pull of the earth fall away from his back and he became weightless, rising toward their streaking light like ofttold tales of souls raptured upward. ***** I don't know about you but, after reading a paragraph like that, I am pretty much committed to reading everything available by its author.

Don't be put off by some of the 1 to 4 star reviews. This is a brilliant book. Yes, BRILLIANT - and I don't say that about many books. This works on so many different levels. It is a page turner and can be devoured in a couple days. But the dialog is so rich, the author's tone and cadence so remarkable that I find myself rereading many passages. This is a book to be read slowly or better yet to be read again. For such a dark book (and it is very dark!) there is a lot of humor. William Gay writes dialog and conversations like no other. The author's ruminations on time and it's passing are remarkable. This is not some disposable adventure / horror story but a classic that will be appreciated by some of us for a very long time.

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.

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...

Described by the author as a modern-day "Hansel and Gretel", this riveting novel addresses the nature of good and evil, social facades stripped away in a plot that is both fearsome and beautifully written, the protagonists trapped in a bad dream peopled with goblins and ghosts, while a very human monster roams freely in a Gothic 1950's landscape. Fenton Breece, the local undertaker, has the look and demeanor of the otherworldly, giving off the scent of decay and dementia. Shunned by the townsfolk, Breece keeps to himself, his shameful secrets hidden behind crafty, scheming eyes. But when Kenneth and Corrie Tyler, two local teenagers, unearth their father's grave and find it filled with desecration, they extend their search to other sites, only to find them equally defiled by the horrors of a sick mind.

Watching Breece's house, Kenneth takes advantage of an opportunity to steal a briefcase that contains no money, but a trove of incriminating evidence against the vile undertaker. Thinking to take advantage of this sudden windfall, Corrie sets a plan in motion by which brother and sister can extort money from Breece. In their naiveté, neither realizes the Pandora's Box they have opened until misery arrives in the person of Granville Sutter, a stone killer charged to retrieve the booty and a generous reward for his efforts. Thus plays out a stunning nightmare, as picturesque as it is terrifying, where true evil stalks the land, Kenneth Tyler gone to ground along with the evidence in the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled brush and vegetation, the very place a symbol for ill luck.

While Breece slides further into the moral morass of his delusions, Sutter tracks Kenneth Tyler through the Harrikin, seemingly prescient, ever but one step behind Tyler, savoring the taste of the kill, terrorizing any brave spirits who help the boy. Set against nature's bountiful chaos, hunter and prey wend through their macabre dance with only the stars and beasts for audience. Like the so-called Preacher in "Night of the Hunter", Sutter stalks his innocent victim, Tyler sure he carries "the seed of some dread plague that would lay waste all before him so that folks... fled into the woods with doors left ajar." Stunning, haunting and primal, Gay has fashioned a luckless pair, retelling a fable laced with the hopelessness of despair and senseless violence. The genius is in the prose, images as striking and memorable as the theme, fate looming in the final clash, where only good or evil will be victorious. Luan Gaines/2006.

What an original, though-provoking thriller of a book! Gay's prose is Faulkneresque and McCarthyesque but it is also wholly his own voice. The odd, macabre events which impel the driving force of this novel are truly bizarre. But totally believable in the Tennessee back-country Gay so eerily evokes. I was on the edge of my seat during the book-length chase through the harrakin. This is a really interesting novel and I highly recommend it.

An occasionally grisly Southern gothic novel, "Twilight" is intriguing throughout, but doesn't quite lead to the fireworks finale you'd expect.

First thing's first: When I started to read "Twilight," one thing caught my eye above all others, and that was author William Gay's staggering command of vocabulary and the English language. Stylistically, he knows how to construct sentences and paragraphs that leave the reader feeling almost unworthy in his presence.

Because of Gay's obvious literary talents, "Twilight" sort of feels like it is beneath him. The story proceeds down a typical genre path and, save for one particular scene involving necrophilia and another scene involving an old woman who isn't who she at first seems to be, there are few surprises throughout.

As teenage lead Kenneth Tyler journeys further and further into rural Tennessee's decomposing backwoods, chased by hired killer Granville Sutter, who wants to retrieve pictures Tyler has that incriminate mortician Fenton Breece in abhorrently criminal after-hours behavior, the book's interest lies in Gay's textural, atmospheric depiction of the one-of-a-kind setting and in the question of whether Sutter is going to catch Tyler. The latter point, however, is predictable, and the final pages elicit little more than a shrug, especially considering that Granville Sutter and Fenton Breece are potentially brilliant villains, horrifically conceived but not used to their fullest abilities.

"Twilight" is worth a read, indeed, but this is one case where the writing is superior to what is ultimately offered by the plot.

A necrophiliac undertaker hires psychotic Grenville Sutter to retrieve incriminating photographs stolen by Kenneth Tyler and his sister. A chase ensues across the Harrikin;an uncomprimising woodland that has consumed old towns and is populated by derelicts both human and man made...
Ultimately, I was left disappointed by 'Twilight'. I had read and been extremely impressed by Gays earlier novels;'The Long Home' and-in particular-'Provinces of Night' both of which I would recommend way above 'Twilight'
Although Gay populates and decribes in his unique prose a south that has long since disappeared, 'Twilight' just doesn't satisfy in the same way that Gays earlier works do.I felt myself forced a little to go along with the plot, and over use of analogies in describing the abandoned towns and over use of 'Hunkering' and 'Arcane' in the narrative jarred where it never did in 'The Long Home' or 'Provinces'
Gay is in the unique mold of great southern writers-from Faulkner to Ford;Styron to Woolfe. Of this there can be little real argument, but 'Twilight' is the weaker of his works.
This would make a terrific film if produced Charles Laughton 'Night of the Hunter' style (which Gay quotes in book two)A modern day 'Deliverence maybe.

The Cormac McCarthy of Tennessee. Dark, lyric, mesmerizing. Classic Southern Gothic. Grim, haunting, oddly hopeful. Highly recommended.

William Gay's book is excellent - more in spite of the story, than because of it. Gay's writing style is marvelous. He uses words and images that stop you in your tracks as you read the book. The story is about a pair of siblings who get mixed up with a perverted undertaker and a murderer hired to get incriminating evidence against the undertaker from the boy. The book is easy to read and can be read rather quickly, but I advise you to read it slowly and relish every word.