From the Publisher
John Moon lives in a trailer on an acre of the farm claimed from his family by the bank years ago for reasons he never fully understood. His wife has just abandoned him, taking their infant son, and he is supporting himself by doing odd jobs and poaching game on a neighbor's land. Out hunting deer one morning, he hears the rustle of branches and fires a single shot - only to discover that he has killed a teenage girl. Horrified, Moon tries to cover up his act, and then to find out who the girl was and what she was doing in the woods. Fear, guilt, and obsession lead him to uncover a pattern of evil involving the residents of the town - and before long all the plots have converged on him.
Publishers Weekly
In a starred review, PW called this story of accidental death in the Blue Ridge Mountains a "gritty, claustrophobic blend of Jim Thompson and James Dickey." (May)
Library Journal
Abandoned by his wife and young son, John Moon sits in his trailer on the mountainside, feeling abused by the world. All he has left is an acre-and-a-half of the family farm, and he makes do with odd jobs and poaching game off state land. One morning he goes hunting a deer out of season and winds up killing a young runaway instead. In trying to hide the evidence of his accidental crime, Moon finds a huge sum of money, plus evidence that the young girl was not alone. Will Moon's crime be discovered? What will be the consequences for him and his family? The action in the novel takes place in the span of just seven days, and Moon's inevitable mental deterioration in the face of his horrible crime lends force to the narrative. Jones (The Elements of Hitting, LJ 3/1/94) has fashioned a compelling and readable story of one man's struggle with enormous guilt and his inability to make things go right in a world determined to make him fail. The mood is bleak, and the ending poetically just. This is not a comfortable novel to read, but it is a powerful one that deserves a wide readership. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.-Dean James, Houston Acad. of Medicine/Texas Medical Ctr. Lib.
BookList
John Moon lives in a trailer on the land that was once part of his family's farm until his father lost the land to foreclosure. All John has ever wanted to do is farm, but instead, he drifts from job to job. His wife has left him and moved to town, taking their young son. One day, out poaching, he accidentally shoots and kills a teenage girl. Nearby, in a lean-to, he discovers a sleeping bag, a few items of clothing that belonged to the dead girl, and a large sum of cash. Partly because he cannot accept what he has done and partly because he is afraid no one will believe the shooting was an accident, he wraps the girl in the sleeping bag and leaves her in a cave. But that single shot in the woods has completely changed his life. He can't get away from the girl, not from the knowledge of what he did to her, or even from her remains, since her corpse ends up in his freezer. Intense, violent, and graphic, this novel of backwoods mayhem may remind some readers of "Deliverance".
Kirkus Reviews
Backwoods blood and gore from the author whose previous expeditions into the grotesque (The Cooter Farm, 1991; The Elements of Hitting, 1994) have shown just how far we can go down Tobacco Road.
John Moon is the sort of country boy who makes his living by killing things in the forest. Unhappily divorced from a wife who looks upon him as no-account trash, he sets out at the beginning of the story to patch things up by poaching a deer for her, but he accidentally shoots a young girl instead. This is his first mistake, and even John can see that it's a big one. "He thinks of the hundreds of animals he has shot, gutted, and cut into strips of meat. . . . Blood is blood, he thinks, wiping the girl's on his pants. And dead is dead." What to do? Well, of course the police are out of the question, so John very sensibly locks the girl's corpse in his freezer along with his venison steaks and tries to go on as before. Unfortunately, however, the girl had a very mean boyfriend who deals drugs and just happens to be an old prison friend of one of John's neighbors. John's attorney, Daggard Pitt, suspects that something is up, but John can't quite bring himself to trust the lawyer (he used to work for the bank that foreclosed on his parents' farm), and he manages to dig himself a very deep hole in short order. There's a climactic bloodbath, and along the way we're treated to a fair amount of sleazy hillbilly sex, but this is nevertheless a story aiming to be about moral regeneration, written in the most tragic Faulknerian mode. The tragedy here, though, seems merely to degrade with an even hand, and it's not at all clear at the end that anyone has truly been saved.
Powerfully written but ultimately empty.
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