Where all light tends to go

David Joy, 1983-

Book - 2015

"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--

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FICTION/Joy, David
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Subjects
Genres
Bildungsromans
Published
New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons [2015]
Language
English
Main Author
David Joy, 1983- (author)
Physical Description
260 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780425279793
9780399172779
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THE CAREER CRIMINALS in genre novels don't have money problems. If they need some, they just go out and steal it. But such financial transactions can backfire, which is what happened back in 2004 when the Texas gang in Michael Robotham's LIFE OR DEATH (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) robbed $7 million from an armored truck. That ill-fated enterprise ended with four people dead. One robber was shot and captured alive, but the surviving gang member was never seen again and the money was never recovered. Audie Palmer survived the bullets that led to his capture, but he's had to fight for his life every day of the 10 years he's spent in prison. According to the inmate who befriended him, Moss Webster (a convicted killer but a prince of a guy), "that boy was stabbed, strangled, beaten, glassed and burned" by guards and inmates alike, thinking they could force him to reveal what became of the money and his brother, Carl, who presumably fled with it. These attacks intensify as Audie's release date nears, but on the morning of his discharge he's nowhere to be found. "What sort of idiot escapes the day before his release?" wonders Special Agent Desiree Furness of the F.B.I., who's smarter than most of the other characters looking for Audie. But not as shrewd as the shady individuals who arrange a furlough for Moss and the promise of freedom if he finds his friend before the rest of the mob. Although Audie is entirely too composed for someone looking into the teeth of this wolf pack, he's a man with hidden depths and horrific secrets. Moss is your real boon companion on this manhunt. A big bruiser, he may not be as subtle a thinker as Agent Furness or as complicated a character as Audie, but he's emotionally involved in Audie's fate and morally conflicted about his own role in determining it. Besides, his warm voice, thick with country honey, is the one you want to hear. Robotham, who's from Australia, isn't entirely at ease with the Texas vernacular, but he's responsive enough to the idiosyncrasies of the culture that he can thrill to a piece of American Gothic like this sign on a church in Houston: "If you really love God, show Him your money." ARIANA FRANKLIN died before she could finish the siege winter (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99). But her daughter, Samantha Norman, picked up the narrative and has delivered a rousing but unsparingly harsh account of medieval life as experienced by ordinary people. England is engulfed in civil war in A.D. 1141 when the fighting reaches the small fenland village from which 11-year-old Emma is kidnapped, savagely abused and left for dead by a vile monk traveling with marauding mercenaries on their way to sack Ely Cathedral. A kinder, more principled mercenary named Gwilherm de Vannes saves the girl's life and helps her disguise herself as his apprentice - no more a weak girl but a brave boy named Penda. In a parallel narrative featuring another resourceful female, 16-year-old Maud of Kenniford takes over the management of her ancestral castle and becomes a political force in negotiations with the warring monarchs, King Stephen and Empress Matilda. "I am the chatelaine," she asserts, in swearing allegiance to the empress, who takes refuge at Kenniford, triggering the siege that becomes the heart of the book. The intricate narrative design of the novel works a murderous subplot involving that fiendish monk into a broader view of how feudal law broke down under the anarchy of civil war. Those thrilling battles do look different when seen by women like Maud, Emma and the empress. IN THE MOUNTAINS of North Carolina, the setting of David Joy's remarkable first novel, WHERE ALL LIGHT TENDS TO GO (Putnam, $26.95), "outlawing was just as much a matter of blood as hair color and height." Jacob McNeely, the 18-year-old son of the regional drug lord, has no illusions about who he is or where he came from. ("Mama snorted crystal, Daddy sold it to her.") But his love for the smartest girl in town makes him think he might yet determine who he becomes. No such luck, as long as Daddy needs him to help move product, launder money or dump bodies in the reservoir. That last incident entirely upsets Jacob's equilibrium, dragging him deeper into his father's affairs and further away from the future he wants for himself. This isn't your ordinary coming-of-age novel, but with his bone-cutting insights into these men and the region that bred them, Joy makes it an extraordinarily intimate experience. MAISIE DOBBS is getting paranoid - or else everyone she meets is spying on her in A DANGEROUS PLACE (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99), the latest installment of Jacqueline Winspear's consistently interesting series about a trained psychologist turned private investigator. Maisie is still in shock from the personal losses she has suffered in the four years since we've last seen her. She's sailing home to England from India when she stops off in Gibraltar, which is not a healthy place to be in 1937, with civil war raging across the border in Spain, German bombers headed for Guernica and foreign operatives skulking around every corner. Try as she might to concentrate on a murder case, she's drawn into a climate of political intrigue that repels her - but keeps the rest of us avidly reading.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 22, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review

Joy's first novel is an uncompromising noir, its downward thrust pulling like quicksand on both the characters and the reader. And, yet, there is poetry here, too, as there is in Daniel Woodrell's novels, the kind of poetry that draws its power from a doomed character's grit in the face of disaster. And Jacob McNeely, the son of a meth dealer in hardscrabble North Carolina, is surely doomed, as is his stoned mother and even his all-powerful father. It's only a question of what form that doom will take: Will Jacob continue to be enslaved to his father, or will he attempt to break away when the world tells him no escape is possible? Answering questions like that is what keeps noir fans coming back for more. In Jacob's case, it's also listening to him think about his girlfriend, Maggie, who just might have a way out: We just stood there with that June sun beating down on us, both of us lost, but only her having somewhere to go. Joy, on the other hand, definitely has a place to go. This is the start of a very promising fiction-writing career.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

North Carolina memoirist Joy (Growing Gills) sets his gripping first novel in his native Appalachia. Jacob McNeely, the 18-year-old son of a meth-addicted mother and a sociopathic father who operates a drug ring, has always believed he can't transcend his roots. But when his childhood sweetheart, Maggie Jennings, graduates from high school, she asks him to leave the mountains with her, and he begins to envision a life free of his family legacy. Threats to his father's business provoke violence, however, ensnaring Jacob in murder and betrayal even as he plans his escape. Despite his recreational drug use and propensity for violence, he has a capacity for selfless love that will keep readers invested in his struggle. Some Appalachian clichés and repetitive descriptions don't detract from the tragic, absorbing plot. Engaging characters, a well-realized setting, and poetic prose establish Joy as a novelist worth watching. Agent: Julia Kenny, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Starred Review. Upon turning 16, Jacob McNeely drops out of high school to work for his father, who runs a meth ring in the mountains of western North Carolina. A few years later, he is tasked with disposing of Robbie-one of his father's meth suppliers-but the killing is botched when Robbie is found, barely alive. At the same time, Jacob's attempt at rekindling his relationship with ex-girlfirend Maggie is thwarted when he is arrested for assaulting Maggie's new boyfriend. Tension escalates among the McNeely family members as Jacob's father becomes paranoid that Robbie will squeal to the cops about Jacob's role. VERDICT Readers of Southern grit lit in the tradition of Daniel Woodrell and Harry Crews will enjoy this fast-paced debut thriller by the author of Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman's Journey. Fan of Ron Rash's novels will appreciate the intricate plot and Joy's establishment of a strong sense of place in his depiction of rural Appalachia.-Russell Michalak, Goldey-Beacom Coll. Lib., Wilmington, DE (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The father's a killer, the mother's an addict, and the son's just plain trapped in this blunt-force account of an Appalachian family.Charlie McNeely controls the lucrative crystal meth business in his neck of the woods; his estranged wife, Laura, is one of his customers. The work involves killing; real men kill, and the rest are pussies, according to Charlie. Having cops on his payroll provides protection. With bad McNeely blood in his veins, the self-loathing 18-year-old Jacob sees himself as trash. Two years earlier, he broke up with his childhood sweetheart, Maggie, not wanting to drag her into the abyss. Now Jacob is facing a manhood test Daddy has set up. (As narrator, he calls his parents Daddy and Mama.) Robbie Douglas, an employee, has snitched and must be disposed of. In the deep-woods shack, he finds the Cabe brothers, also employees, have Robbie tied up and bleeding. The brothers splash him with sulfuric acid and leave him for dead on the mountainside. It was a sloppy job. Robbie is found, unconscious but alive. Now it's the Cabes' turn. Big Daddy beats them bloody, shoots them and has Jacob help him dump them in the lake. Jacob is now accessory to two, maybe three murders, and his situation becomes even more dire when he discovers his blood-soaked Mama, who has shot herself at his Daddy's urging. Still, there's a glimmer of hope when Maggie, who is a Good Woman, returns to him, saying "You're the strongest man I know." Might Jacob overcome his fatalism? Joy struggles with that, just as he struggles to give complexity to that dead-eyed evildoer of a father, but he ultimately finds it simplest to obey his first commandment: Shed blood. A dark semiautobiographical first novel in which action flourishes at the expense of character development. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

One I hid the pickup behind a tangled row of pampas grass that had needed burning a good year or so before. The law never liked for folks to climb the water tower, but I hadn't ever cared much for the law. I was a McNeely and, in this part of Appalachia, that meant something. Outlawing was just as much a matter of blood as hair color and height. Besides, the water tower was the best place to see graduation caps thrown high when seniors wearing black robes and tearful smiles headed out of Walter Middleton School one last time. Rungs once painted white were chipped and rusted and slumped in the middle from years of being climbed by wide-eyed kids looking to paint their names on the town. Those things that seemed as if they'd last forever never did. I didn't even make it out of tenth grade, and maybe that's why I hadn't felt the need to scale that tower with britches weighed down by spray-paint cans. There was no need to cement my name. A name like Jacob McNeely raised eyebrows and questions. In a town this small, all eyes were prying eyes. I couldn't show my face, didn't want the problems and rumors that being down there would bring, but I had to see her leave. The grate platform circling the water tank had lost all but a few screws and curled up at the edges like a twice-read book. Every step I took shifted metal, but it was a place I'd stood before, a place I'd navigated on every drug I'd ever taken. With only a buzz from my morning smoke lingering, there wasn't need for worries. I sat beneath green letters dripping a nearly illegible "FUCK U" across the front side of the tank, pulled a soft pack of Winstons from the pocket of my jeans, lit the last cigarette I had, and waited. The school I'd spent the majority of my life in seemed smaller now, though looking back it had never been big enough. I grew up twenty miles south of Sylva, a town that really wasn't much of a town at all but the closest thing to one in Jackson County. If you were passing through, you'd miss Sylva if you blinked, and the place where I was from you could overlook with your eyes peeled. Being a small, mountain community that far away, we only had one school. So that meant that kids who grew up in this county would walk into Walter Middleton at five years old and wouldn't leave until graduation thirteen years down the road. Growing up in it, I never found it strange to share the halls with teens when I was a kid and kids when I was a teen, but looking down on it now, two years after leaving for good, the whole thing was alien. The white dome roofing the gym looked like a bad egg bobbing in boiling water, the courtyard was lined in uneven passes from a lawnmower, and a painting of the school mascot, centered in the parking lot, looked more like a chupacabra than any bobcat I'd ever seen. To be honest, there wasn't too much worth remembering from my time there, but still it had accounted for ten of my eighteen years. Surprisingly, though, that wasn't disappointing. What was disappointing about that school, my life, and this whole fucking place was that I'd let it beat me. I'd let what I was born into control what I'd become. Mama snorted crystal, Daddy sold it to her, and I'd never had the balls to leave. That was my life in a nutshell. I took a drag from my last cigarette and hocked a thick wad of spit over the railing. I was watching a wake of buzzards whirl down behind a mountain when the side door cracked against the gymnasium brick. One kid tore out in front of the crowd, and even before he jumped onto the hood of his car, I knew him. Blane Cowen was the type to drink a beer and scream wasted. I'd tested him once back in middle school, brought him up here on the water tower to smoke a joint, and when his legs got wobbly and vertigo set in he decided awfully fast he didn't want to play friends anymore. In a school filled with kids who swiped prescription drugs from their parents' medicine cabinets, Blane was the village idiot. But despite all that, I kind of felt sorry for the bastard, standing there, arms raised in the air as he dented in the hood of a beat-up Civic, no one in his class paying him a lick of attention while he howled. The parking lot that had seemed so desolate just a minute before was crawling now as friends hugged, told promises they'd never be able to keep, and ran off to parents who had no clue of who their children had become. I knew it because I'd grown up with them, all of them, and all of us knew things about one another that we'd never share. Most of us knew things that we didn't even want to confess to ourselves, so we took those secrets with us like condoms, stuffed in wallets, that would never be used. I wanted to be down there with them, if not as a classmate, then at least as a friend, but none of them needed my baggage. Not until she took off her cap did I recognize her in the crowd. Maggie Jennings stood there and pulled her hair out of a bun, shook blond curls down across her shoulders, and kicked high heels from her feet. The front of her graduation gown was unzipped, and a white sundress held tight to her body. I could almost make out her laugh in the clamor as her boyfriend, Avery Hooper, picked her up from behind and spun her around wildly. Maggie's mother hunched with her hands covering her face as if to conceal tears, and Maggie's father put his arm around his wife's waist and drew her close. A person who didn't know any better would have thought them the perfect American family. Live the lie and they'll believe the lie, but I knew different. I'd known Maggie my whole life. The house she grew up in was two beats of a wing as the crow flies from my front porch, so there hadn't been many days of my childhood spent without her by my side. About the first memory I can recall is being five or six with pants rolled up, the two of us digging in the creek for spring lizards. We were tighter than a burl, as Daddy'd say. In a way, I guess, Maggie and me raised each other. Back before her father found Jesus, he'd run off on a two- or three-week drunk with no one seeing hide nor hair of him till it was over. Her mother worked two jobs to keep food on the table, but that meant there wasn't a soul watching when Maggie and I'd head into the woods, me talking her into all sorts of shit that most kids wouldn't have dreamed. I guess we were twelve or so when her father got saved and moved the family off The Creek. Folks said he poured enough white liquor in the West Fork of the Tuckasegee to slosh every speckled trout from Nimblewill to Fontana, but I never figured him much for saving. A drunk's a drunk just like an addict's an addict, and there ain't a God you can pray to who can change a damn bit of it. But Maggie was different. Even early on I remember being amazed by her. She'd always been something slippery that I never could seem to grasp, something buried deep in her that never let anything outside of herself decide what she would become. I'd always loved that about her. I'd always loved her. We were in middle school when the tomboy I grew up with started filling out. Having been best friends, when I asked Maggie out in eighth grade, it seemed like that shit they write in movies. We were together for three years, a lifetime it had felt like. What meant the most to me was that Maggie knew where I'd come from, knew what I was being groomed into, and still believed I could make it out. I'd thought my life was chosen, that I didn't really have a say in the matter, but Maggie dreamed for me. She told me I could be anything I wanted, go any place that looked worth going, and there were times I almost believed her. Folks like me were tied to this place, but Maggie held no restraints. She was out of here from the moment she set her eyes on the distance. If I ever did have a dream, it was that she might take me with her. But dreams were silly for folks like me. There always comes a time when you have to wake up. I was proud that she was headed to a place I could never go, and I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket to text her, "Congrats." When Avery let go, Maggie jumped into her father's arms, bent her legs behind her with bare feet pointed into the sky. Her father buried his head into his daughter's hair, pretended for a split second that he'd had something to do with how she turned out, then placed her on the ground for her mother to kiss. Maggie stood there for a moment, rocked back and forth before she turned away. She glanced behind her to say something as she ran off to Avery's truck, but her parents had said their good-byes. In a way, I think they knew she was already gone. They knew it just as much as I did. A girl like that couldn't stay. Not forever, and certainly not for long. Excerpted from Where All Light Tends to Go by David Joy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.