Twilight: A Novel
by William Gay
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Book Summary Information
Author: William GayEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-07
ISBN: 1596922648
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Book Reviews of Twilight: A Novel
Book Review: Amazing writing, but lacks just a bit of punch.
Summary: 4 Stars
My first exposure to William Gay were his short stories "The Paperhanger" and "Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?" which both rank as some of the best short stories I've ever read, so I was excited to read this novel.
William Gay's writing style is amazing, and you'll be hard pressed to find a more complex writer (in terms of both style, vocabulary and readability); I often look up words when reading, but with Gay there were simply too many and it started interrupting the flow of the story! I consider this a plus, as not knowing exact definitions didn't hinder overal understanding at any point, but some people may consider it a negative. The old, over-used saying about how he could be writing the phone book and make it interesting is very true here, his writing ability alone is deserving of 5 stars.
The story itself, though, wasn't quite as good as I was hoping (3 stars). I'm sure to a lot of people the story was 'out there' and packed a lot of punch, but after reading the afore mentioned short stories the punch in Twilight just isn't completely there. It's ironic (or something) that his amazing style works against him at times in that his long, winding sentences often turned into long, winding sections that are very well written, but in the grand scheme of the plot had the effect of being distracting. His details were always great, style always great, but often the suspense was being built and fully built for so long that by the time the punch was supposed to hit, it really wasn't very impactful.
It's still an amazing book to read, and even more so one to study if you're a writer yourself, but comparing this to the two short stories I mentioned earlier I'd have to say that William Gay's power is much more evident in short stories where he has an amazing knack to build empathy very quickly (often empathy in horrible people) before he knocks you out with the huge finales. In his short stories the punch is fast and hard, and leaves you reeling (in a good way) often before you even see it coming, and particularly before too much 'down time' where you get impatient waiting for the punch or worse have time to question what's going on in the story (as sometimes happened in Twilight).
It's still a great book, and by far the best book released in the last few years called Twilight! hah
Summary of Twilight: A Novel
From the acclaimed author of Provinces of Night, a Southern gothic novel about an undertaker who won t let the dead rest. Suspecting that something is amiss with their father s burial, teenager Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie venture to his gravesite and make a horrific discovery: their father, a whiskey bootlegger, was not actually buried in the casket they bought for him. Worse, they learn that the undertaker, Fenton Breece, has been grotesquely manipulating the dead. Armed with incriminating photographs, Tyler becomes obsessed with bringing the perverse undertaker to justice. But first he must outrun Granville Sutter, a local strongman and convicted murderer hired by Fenton to destroy the evidence. What follows is an adventure through the Harrikin, an eerie backwoods filled with tangled roads, rusted machinery, and eccentric squatters old men, witches, and families among them who both shield and imperil Tyler as he runs for safety. With his poetic, haunting prose, William Gay rewrites the rules of the gothic fairytale while exploring the classic Southern themes of good and evil.Horror Books
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