Blackwood

“Somethins out there.”

Red Bluff, Mississippi is a town that has known bad times. It’s rural and overgrown with Kudzu vines. When Myer, the towns aged lawman, encounters a family of drifters, he wants to help, he tries to help, but how do you help those who don’t appear to want it? Myer believes that the town that wears the pain of generations on its shoulders is still good. He believes this even as he, himself, is haunted by a suicide that occurred twenty years ago.

But as the Kudzu vines keep growing, so does the generations of danger, violence, regret, pain, and secrets. The kudzu overtakes everything including cars and homes. But the town remembers, or at least they believe they remember.

“You look broken and you are broken and it’s okay to be broken.”

They remember a young man who left and has now returned. They remember how his father died. Colburn knows they remember but he has come to town answering an advertisement, free space for artists. He drives throughout the countryside collecting scrapes, metal and other parts to use in his sculpting. He has a sad existence made better when he meets the local bar owner, Celia.

“…he felt solace in the peace that comes from knowing you have a purpose. Knowing you can affect this world.”

But there is an evil that lurks here deep down in the Kudzu. Something is there, waiting, lurking, and like the kudzu will it overtake the people of the town? Will the people survive as they always have? What does it mean to be broken, to be unwanted, to feel unloved?

“I’m afraid. That’s how I know I am alive.”

There is the raw grittiness of hunger, of lust, of violence, of regret, of lost opportunities, of loss and of survival. The people in this town know pain, they know injustice, they know heartache and they know that something whispers in the night.

You know when you read a book and you enjoy it and you think it is good and you put it down happy. But then there are books, like this one, that pack a powerful punch. Beautifully written, full of beauty, full of pain, full of grace and I could literally feel the emotion dripping from the pages. Michael Farris Smith has a gift that he has poured into the pages of this book. No one writes desperation, pain, and about the bleakness of a hard life in such heartbreaking beautiful prose. There are good books and then there are great books. This is the later. A beautifully written, moving and thought-provoking book that raises the bar and doesn’t disappoint.

Highly recommend.

Thank you to Little Brown and Company and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.