Review by Booklist Review
Bill draws wrenching parallels between battle and family-abuse trauma through evocative hallucinations, survival-of-the-fittest settings, and disarming compassion. With his (deceased) platoon-mate Childers riding shotgun, Vietnam veteran Miles Knox clocks in at a clay processing plant, staves off aging with steroids, and finds comfort with his girlfriend, Shelby, who, for her part, dances at the Deja Vu club and has her hands full looking after her alcoholic father and heroin-addicted brother, Wylie. When Miles doesn't hear from Shelby, he keeps to himself, thinking she's wised up and moved on. Unfortunately, thanks to Wylie and her abusive father, Shelby is wrapped up in the murder of Wylie's dealers. The dealers' young son, Shadrack, has followed the plan his parents laid out when trouble knocks: run to his uncle Nathaniel. Following the few clues Shadrack can offer, Nathaniel and Miles begin a grim quest to flush the killer from Indiana's backwoods, hitting dealer haunts, off-the-books gambling dens, and secret growing operations. Bill's descriptions are both ugly and beautiful, often merging the hunt with Miles' Vietnam flashbacks, capturing the realities of those resigned to being left behind and the violence that offers short-lived power. Pair this visceral read with Kevin Hardcastle's gritty story collection Debris (2016), Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone (2006), and Chris Offutt's The Killing Hills (2021).
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bill's feverish latest (after The Savage) shines a light on an American heartland blighted by crushed dreams and debilitating addictions. Among the working-class characters in Corydon, Ind., is Miles Knox, a 57-year-old Vietnam vet who works in the local paint-additive factory in the early 2000s. Miles is so haunted by memories of war that he converses with dead buddies as though they're still alive and guzzles steroids to keep those thoughts at bay. Miles's much younger girlfriend, Shelby McCutchen, works as a stripper and looks after her twin brother, Wylie, who's addicted to Oxycontin. Wylie's supplier, Bedford Timberlake, has just died, and Bedford's ex-cop brother, Nathaniel, thinks Wylie killed him. The paths of these and numerous others converge over the course of a gore-spattered and drug-laced day of reckoning, as Nathaniel sets out to get revenge for Bedford's death. Bill refracts the events through a variety of viewpoints, with some of the characters so compromised by drugs that the story turns surreal. With kinetic prose, Bill keeps up the pace and delivers a steady supply of grisly details (a dead man laid out on a floor is "smeared like a dream one couldn't recollect, being delivered in fragments and knots of bone and red to a parched mind"). It makes for one hell of a ride. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Grim, violent, and chock-full of mayhem and despair--welcome back to Frank Bill country. Miles Knox is an aging Vietnam vet, well-meaning but prone to steroid-fueled rage--and tortured still by what he saw and did in country. Shelby McCutchen is his much-younger girlfriend, a stripper forced to take care of the fragile and damaged men in her family: her painkiller-addicted twin, Wylie, and her drunk and deeply unpleasant father. When Wylie is sought for the coldblooded double murders of his oxy dealers--sought by the slow and irrelevant forces of the law but also, more dangerously, by Nathaniel, the resourceful ex-cop whose brother was one of the victims--he holes up at Miles' rural fishing camp, with Shelby as a kind of hostage. Meanwhile Miles (when he's not distracted by brutal fistfights, flashbacks, job worries, and even an industrial accident) begins in a haphazard way to search for her...and he and Nathaniel eventually join forces, though at this point (it's a long story) Miles, having suddenly been introduced to LSD, is inhabiting a hallucinatory world that's equal parts southern Indiana now and southern Vietnam then. The book is not so much gritty as relentlessly grim--at its bleakest it seems a kind of ruin porn focused not on bombed-out buildings but on bombed-out people--but it does move quickly, with plenty of surprises, and it provides the all-hell-broke-loose tumult one expects from Bill. Reading it is like mainlining testosterone and hopelessness...and whether or not that seems like a compliment to you will give a good sense of whether you're the intended audience. All ain't well in the heartland. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
