Dogs of God
Barry D. Marcus (Jacket and spine photographs) New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1994. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [12], 354, [2] pages. Signed by the author on the half title page. Full of the intensity and vibrance of Appalachian speech, a tale set in rural West Virginia vividly captures the violence of a backwoodsman and drug lord named Tannhauser and the innocence of a young man named Goody. Pinckney Benedict (born 1964) is an American short-story writer and novelist whose work often reflects his Appalachian background. Benedict graduated from Princeton University, where he studied primarily with Joyce Carol Oates, in 1986, and from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1988. He has published three collections of short fiction (Town Smokes, The Wrecking Yard, and Miracle Boy) and a novel (Dogs of God). His stories have appeared in publications including Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, StoryQuarterly, Ontario Review, Appalachian Heritage, the O. Henry Award series, the New Stories from the South series and the Pushcart Prize series. Along with his wife, the novelist Laura Benedict, he edits the biennial Surreal South fiction anthology series. The third volume of the series, Surreal South '11, was published in October 2011. He wrote the screenplay for the feature film Four Days, which starred Kevin Zegers, Colm Meaney, Lolita Davidovich, and William Forsythe. He serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina. He served on the writing faculties of Oberlin College, Princeton University, and as a Thurber House Fellow at the Ohio State University. He is a full professor in the English Department at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: In this taut, muscular thriller set in contemporary rural West Virginia, short-story writer Benedict hurtles the reader toward a chillingly apocalyptic climax replete with high-tech weaponry and old-fashioned treachery. Peopled with an assortment of New South grotesques, the story centers on Goody, a young bare-fisted fighter new to the neighborhood, and Tannhauser, a deranged, 12-fingered backwoods drug lord with a penchant for sadism. They and a host of other odd, not to say perverse, characters are memorably portrayed, due in large part to Benedict's deft use of multiple points of view. The down-at-the-heels atmosphere of the backwoods South is also convincing; the region's tattered history reposes in the land, and the characters both literally and figuratively stumble through it, bumbling onto an overgrown confederate cemetery, an eerie abandoned resort and subterranean, prehistoric chambers as they move toward their inevitable appointment with destiny. Benedict portrays Goody's loss of innocence and painful acquisition of wisdom in prose laced with Appalachian figures of speech, the down-home rhythms of ridge-runner dialect and an undercurrent of menacing violence. This is an ambitious and skillful literary thriller, not to mention a rip-roaring read. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Tannhauser, Drug Lord, Marijuana, Boxer, Landlord, Henchman, Gunrunners, DEA, Drug Enforcement, Police, Torture, Caves, Salvation, Treachery, Sadism, Cemetery, Innocence, Wisdom, Appalachian, Violence
ISBN: 0385420226
[Book #88313]
Price: $125.00