Poachers

Description

In ten stunning and bleak tales set in the woodlands, swamps and chemical plants along the Alabama River, Tom Franklin stakes his claim as a fresh, original Southern voice. His lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poaching-a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella (selected for the anthologies New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best Mystery Stories of the Century), three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: "Jesus is not coming." This terrain isn't pretty, isn't for the weak of heart, but in these deperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human.

Description

Tom Franklin writes about hunting and fishing, poachers and drunks, factory workers and poor white trash. These are men who react, often violently, against a dying world whose gravity they can't escape. In polluted swamps and contaminated rivers, in leaky gas stations and smoky industrial plants, the people who inhabit these stories are all poachers. In the title novella (selected for inclusion in both New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best American Mystery Stories, 1999), three half-wild brothers kill anything that crosses them, including a rookie lawman, which brings back into the swamp Alabama's mythic Frank David, a game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river these men haunt. In "Grit," an unlucky plant foreman and his bookie run a phantom night shift in a slag factory, making black market sandblasting grit and heading for a deadly confrontation. And in "The Ballad of Duane Juarez," the destitute, alcoholic narrator lives off the scraps of his brother and his brother's rich wife, sinking to nearly unimaginable depths.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Poachers: storiesWilliam Morrow1999-01-01
• PoachersPaperbackHarper Perennial2000-05-30
• PoachersPaperbackFlamingo2000-06-05
• PoachersFlamingo2000-06-05
• PoachersElectronic resourceHarperCollins2007-01-01