I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Doc Ebersole lives with the ghost of Hank Williams. Literally.
In 1963, ten years after giving Hank the overdose that killed him, Doc is wracked by addiction. Having lost his licence to practise medicine, he lives in a rented room in the red-light district on the south side of San Antonio, performing abortions and patching up the odd knife or gunshot wound. But when Graciela, a young Mexican immigrant, appears in the neighbourhood in search of Doc's services, miraculous things begin to happen. Everyone she meets is transformed for the better, except, maybe, for Hank's angry ghost - who isn't at all pleased to see Doc doing well.
I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive is a poetic ghost story, as well as a ballad of regret and redemption, and miracles.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this spruce debut novel (nine years after his short story collection, Doghouse Roses), hard-core troubadour Earle ponders miracles, morphine, and mortality in 1963 San Antonio, Tex., where aging junkie Doc Ebersole performs backroom abortions to support his habit. Ten years before, the doctor was riding shotgun while his patient, fishing buddy, and fellow addict Hank Williams coughed his last in the Cadillac's backseat. Ever since, Hank has haunted Doc, who now "saw no need to squander more than a single syllable on a miserable life such as his own." Hank's ghost berates Doc for taking in one of Doc's "in trouble" Mexican girls, Graciela, who has breathed life not only into the lonesome codger, but into scores of San Antonio desperados who slink through their boarding-house clinic. Word is spreading that Graciela heals and redeems, and that even Doc might kick his habit if he doesn't kick the bucket first. With its Charles Portis vibe and the author's immense cred as a musician and actor, this should have no problem finding the wide audience it deserves. It won't hurt that Earle's next album comes out around the same time and shares the title.
