As a genre, I am beginning to tire of any novel or short story collection that would fit the label of “country” or “southern” noir. For the most part, they are quite entertaining: gritty, hardboiled stories of lowlifes trying to carve out their little piece of happiness by any means necessary, which usually consists of drug deals gone bad and a lot of homegrown bloodletting that churns the stomach and creates tension. But these past few years, I’m starting to think the genre has very little room to grow and each subsequent entry feels derivative of novels and stories that came before it; second rate versions of a Larry Brown, Tom Franklin or Donald Ray Pollock. I don’t want to be too harsh when talking about David Joy’s third novel The Line That Held Us: it is an enthralling read with a scary villain and a flawed hero whose actions we totally buy, but it is quite obvious that this story has been told many times before. The plot is simple: Darl Moody is poaching on private property hunting a huge deer that promises to fill his fridge for the winter. He shoots what he thinks is the deer but it turns out to be a person, but not just any person. The man he shot is Carol Brewer, whose older brother is the monstrous Dwayne Brewer, whose introduction involving a teen he witnessed bullying another kid shows his skewed sense if justice as well as his own gift for inflicting pain. Darl enlists the help of his best friend Calvin Hooper to hide the body, sets off a bloody series of events that threatens to destroy everything Calvin holds dear. It is a swift and brutal 256 pages that goes down smoothly, but it sometimes seems too eager to release the tension, evidenced by its final, frustrating pages. And overall, it is nothing I have not seen many times over by writers as equal in skill to Joy.
Rating: 4/5
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