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Twilight | 
 enlarge | Author: William Gay
Publisher: MacAdam Cage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy New: $7.99
You Save: $6.01 (43%)
New (31) Used (12) from $4.02
Avg. Customer Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 200252
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 225
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 1596922648
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781596922648
ASIN: 1596922648
Publication Date: September 7, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
From the acclaimed author of Provinces of Night, a Southern gothic novel about an undertaker who won t let the dead rest. Suspecting that something is amiss with their father s burial, teenager Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie venture to his gravesite and make a horrific discovery: their father, a whiskey bootlegger, was not actually buried in the casket they bought for him. Worse, they learn that the undertaker, Fenton Breece, has been grotesquely manipulating the dead. Armed with incriminating photographs, Tyler becomes obsessed with bringing the perverse undertaker to justice. But first he must outrun Granville Sutter, a local strongman and convicted murderer hired by Fenton to destroy the evidence. What follows is an adventure through the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled roads, rusted machinery, and eccentric squatters old men, witches, and families among them who both shield and imperil Tyler as he runs for safety. With his poetic, haunting prose, William Gay rewrites the rules of the gothic fairytale while exploring the classic Southern themes of good and evil.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 17 more reviews...
If you like McCarthy and No Country for Old Men December 19, 2008
I really liked this book but its not going to please everyone. Writing style similar to McCarthy but even more southern. Interesting antagonist and creepy villain.
Descriptions of nature and environment are very nicely done and lend an epic feel to a fairly short story.
Highly recommended, especially if you liked No Country, the Road or Blood Meridian.
 Read Cormac McCarthy instead July 24, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
One reviewer calls Gay the Cormac McCarthy of TN. That person must not have read McCarthy's TN novels; McCarthy is the McCarthy of TN, and of everywhere else, and what Gay offers here is a long winded feeble immitation of McCarthy tone, sentence structure, word choices, and subject matter. I don't know why anybody would want to watch a not quite sharp cover band when the real thing can be seen.
Southern Gothic at its Best May 27, 2008
William Gay continues to uphold the tradition of Faulkner and O'Connor with this new story of cruel violence and perversion. There are moments where the reading invokes an experience of complete immersion in the events of the scene that has happened only rarely to me. The ending does seem a bit tacked on and predictable, but doesn't completely upend the effectiveness of the work.
Like Huck Finn with Necrophilia March 31, 2008
I'm a fan of "literary genre fiction" - if that doesn't sound too much like a contradiction - and picked up William Gay's 'Twilight' after reading about it in one of Stephen King's Entertainment Weekly columns. It was one of his Best Of '07 books, and he compared it to Cormac McCarthy's work, which I hold in very high esteem, so I decided to read it.
In all honesty, it is very similar to McCarthy's works. Thematically, of course. The dark crevasses of humanity are well-lighted. Violence, bloodshed, necrophilia, and extortion abound in the first act of the book. It seems almost like a mixture of 'Child of God' and 'No Country for Old Men', if you ask me. I hate to compare the two authors so much as to draw confusion between them, but they have similar styles and thematic concerns. All apologies.
Oh, and is it oh so well-written. Gay's colloquial way of writing conversational prose is excellent, but he'll often drop beautifully rendered phrases and passages on you to show that he's the real deal when it comes to language.
The only problem is that I think the second act drags more than it should. For a short book, I shouldn't have to notice that, 'Oh man, they've been chasing each other for a long time.' And that's sort of what happens. Like the title of the review suggests, you almost think it's like a Mark Twain adventure in the woods of Tennessee.
The colorful secondary characters that pop up stave off the tedium of reading that second act, so it's not that bad. Overall. I think 'Twilight' is a book best suited for those who really like the Southern Gothic aesthetic and are looking for an author not afraid to break right through taboos.
 Starts with a bang, ends in predictability March 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
An occasionally grisly Southern gothic novel, "Twilight" is intriguing throughout, but doesn't quite lead to the fireworks finale you'd expect.
First thing's first: When I started to read "Twilight," one thing caught my eye above all others, and that was author William Gay's staggering command of vocabulary and the English language. Stylistically, he knows how to construct sentences and paragraphs that leave the reader feeling almost unworthy in his presence.
Because of Gay's obvious literary talents, "Twilight" sort of feels like it is beneath him. The story proceeds down a typical genre path and, save for one particular scene involving necrophilia and another scene involving an old woman who isn't who she at first seems to be, there are few surprises throughout.
As teenage lead Kenneth Tyler journeys further and further into rural Tennessee's decomposing backwoods, chased by hired killer Granville Sutter, who wants to retrieve pictures Tyler has that incriminate mortician Fenton Breece in abhorrently criminal after-hours behavior, the book's interest lies in Gay's textural, atmospheric depiction of the one-of-a-kind setting and in the question of whether Sutter is going to catch Tyler. The latter point, however, is predictable, and the final pages elicit little more than a shrug, especially considering that Granville Sutter and Fenton Breece are potentially brilliant villains, horrifically conceived but not used to their fullest abilities.
"Twilight" is worth a read, indeed, but this is one case where the writing is superior to what is ultimately offered by the plot.
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