Review: "The Line That Held Us" by David Joy

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

Review: "The Weight of this World" by David Joy

It is nit rare that a second novel is just as good as the first one. I can think of countless occurrences of this happening, so many of which that I will refrain from naming them. But what is rare is that a second novel is better than the first one, and with his second novel, The Weight of this World, David Joy has crafted a novel that is not only better than the first one, but miles ahead in terms of narrative drive and overall thematic richness. His first novel, Where All Light Tends to Go, rarely felt like another country noir retread that was following in the footsteps writers like Larry Brown and Daniel Woodrell. It was not bad by any means, but in a somewhat bloated genre, it failed to rise out of its trappings and felt doomed to be lost in the shuffle. That is thankfully not the case with this book with its similarly dramatic title, but this time, those comparison to past greats are well earned through buckets of grit, rich descriptions of the book’s surrounding world and a trio of tragic characters stuck in past lives filled with equal parts sorrow and fleeting happiness whose lives are about to change dramatically and not always for the better. While the comparison to Woodrell in Joy’s first book seemed trite and undeserved, here it seems rather appropriate, because this might be the saddest book of this particular genre since The Death of Sweet Mister. It begins with a brutal prologue where Aiden McCall witnesses the murder suicide of his mother and father. It is through this tragedy that he meets Thad Broom and his aging beauty of a mother April. It establishes Aiden’s need for a family and how this need is never really met. Fast forward to their twenties, and the two boys are barley living after the housing crash and make a living robbing foreclosed houses of their copper wiring. It is not until a stash of drug fall into their lap in a scene of slapstick violence do they go down the dark path the book takes the reader. This is a very atypical book in this genre, and every step of the way Joy subverts expectations every step of the way, especially in the book’s final earth shattering 100 pages, where in a moment of depravity the two boys part ways. But to me the true hero of this book is April, who’s lived a hard life and just wants a little bit of happiness. Joy digs deep into her backstory despite getting only a few chapters, but it paints a sad picture of her underlying animosity toward Thad and casts a grim light on the penultimate scene of the book, which is rendered with profound sadness. And when it ends, with Joy having once again subverted my expectations, it ends on a sad note as a character fails to learn a lesson and resigns himself to a living damnation. This is powerful stuff, and Joy never shies away from the humanity of his characters, and while this is a sad story, it is a memorable and engaging one.

Rating: 5/5