The Marble Orchard
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
An engrossing and tragic literary thriller that evokes the sinister realism of Cormac McCarthy and the inescapable family bonds of Daniel Woodrell, The Marble Orchard tells the story of Beam, the black sheep of the Sheetmire family, a large and entrenched rural Kentucky clan. Beam finds himself on the run after killing a man who was trying to rob him, a man who turns out to be the son of Loat Duncan, a powerful local businessman and cold-blooded killer.
With Loat—who is hiding a devastating secret about Beam's past—and Elvis, the local sheriff, hot on his trail, Beam leads a nomadic existence as he descends deeper into his own heart of darkness, slipping from one place to the next, each more mysterious than the last. The people he meets during his journey—an enigmatic trucker dressed in a suit, a cemetery-dwelling Good Samaritan, an armless brothel owner—are pieces of a puzzle that hold the key to Beam's past, as well as his possible future salvation.
Alex Taylor holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and has taught creative writing at Western Kentucky University and McNeese State University. His debut collection, The Name of the Nearest River, was published to great critical acclaim in 2010. Taylor has received the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing, the Barry Hannah Prize for Fiction, and the Eric Hoffer Award in General Fiction. His stories have appeared in the Oxford American, Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, American Short Fiction, the Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. He hails from Rosine, Kentucky.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Kentucky hill people who inhabit the pages of this gothic suspense novel are forged sharply enough to draw blood, which they do with disquieting regularity. This debut novel is a tale of scorching realism, and Taylor's (The Name of the Nearest River) diction, precise and evocative, mirrors the nasty, brutish lives of casually cruel men and stoic women whose decades-long grudges and dark secrets hover dangerously close to the surface. The incident that sets the plot in motion is the murder of a would-be robber by Beam Sheetmire. The robber, the son of a wealthy local businessman, also happens to be involved with a secret from Beam's past. Beam tries to run away, but his flight is too late; his act has already started a string of violence, abetted by a mysterious stranger with uncertain motives and a slight whiff of the supernatural about him. Taylor's plot is relentless and the reader is not released from its throes until the very end not neatly, but with a lingering air of sadness and inevitably that is difficult to shake off. This is a stunning debut novel.