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Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories - Frank Bill
Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories
by: (author)
4.00 40
A ferocious debut that puts Frank Bill’s southern Indiana on the literary map next to Cormac McCarthy’s eastern Tennessee and Daniel Woodrell’s Missouri OzarksCrimes in Southern Indiana is the most blistering, vivid, flat-out fearless debut to plow into American literature in recent years. Frank... show more
A ferocious debut that puts Frank Bill’s southern Indiana on the literary map next to Cormac McCarthy’s eastern Tennessee and Daniel Woodrell’s Missouri OzarksCrimes in Southern Indiana is the most blistering, vivid, flat-out fearless debut to plow into American literature in recent years. Frank Bill delivers what is both a wake-up call and a gut punch. Welcome to heartland America circa right about now, when the union jobs and family farms that kept the white on the picket fences have given way to meth labs, backwoods gunrunners, and bare-knuckle brawling. Bill’s people are pressed to the brink—and beyond. There is Scoot McCutchen, whose beloved wife falls terminally ill, leaving him with nothing to live for—which doesn’t quite explain why he brutally murders her and her doctor and flees, or why, after years of running, he decides to turn himself in. In the title story, a man who has devolved from breeding hounds for hunting to training them for dog-fighting crosses paths with a Salvadoran gangbanger tasked with taking over the rural drug trade, but who mostly wants to grow old in peace. As Crimes in Sourthern Indiana unfolds, we witness the unspeakable, yet are compelled to find sympathy for the depraved. Bill’s southern Indiana is haunted with the deep, authentic sense of place that recalls the best of Southern fiction, but the interconnected stories bristle with the urban energy of a Chuck Palahniuk or a latter-day Nelson Algren and rush with the slam-bang plotting of pulp-noir crime writing à la Jim Thompson. Bill’s prose is gritty yet literary, shocking, and impossible to put down. A dark evocation of the survivalist spirit of the working class, this is a brilliant debut by an important new voice.
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Format: paperback
ISBN: 9780374532888 (0374532885)
Publisher: FSG Originals
Pages no: 272
Edition language: English
Bookstores:
Community Reviews
Seriously, Read a Book!
Seriously, Read a Book! rated it
4.0 Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories
The last time I read a book set in Indiana it was about The Greatest Town in America (First in Friendship, Fourth in Obesity). Throw in Hoosiers, the occasional Pacers game, and a high-school production of The Music Man I saw when I was, at most, ten, and you've pretty much covered the extent of my ...
Sarah's Library
Sarah's Library rated it
5.0 Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill
23/4 - I've never read anything like it, just as the inside front cover predicted. It's nothing like what I was expecting either. It doesn't really have a blub anywhere on the book, so from the title and front cover image I was expecting either true crime or horror revolving around isolated farms ow...
Redacted
Redacted rated it
What the actual fuck? Oh no, Mr. Bill indeed! Wow, these are some truly twisted and excellent stories. Frank Bill is in the same rarified hillbilly noir company as Daniel Woodrell and Donald Pollack. When I say that, I am saying you should read this immediately.
sandin954
sandin954 rated it
Collection of brutally violent short stories set, like the title states, in Southern Indiana. I preferred the stories that were a bit less violent and while the author's writing style was a bit overdone for my tastes I will look for his first novel.
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