The Guilty by Baldacci
Just a few short chapters into Baldacci’s new novel, The Guilty, I paused. I’ve got one short story collection from Faulkner, William Faulkner, the dense, Southern, award-winning, alcoholic writer from the last century, that I never really cracked. My copy, it’s a digital version, convenient, sitting in the iPad’s “To Read” soon stack, and I’ve read part of one story, recalling the sense of Southern Gothic Horror I tend to get from most of Faulkner’s work. Layered, nuanced, and Southern. Oh so very Southern.
Frighteningly Southern.
I seem to recall most of Baldacci’s work was centered in the DC area, Washington, D.C.
With multiple attributions, “Washington (DC): Northern charm, and Southen efficiency…”
The Guilty by Baldacci
Southern Writing, maybe just Southern Writers, there’s a festering, dark, malignancy that pervades the works, shot through with an undertaker’s eye for the darkly comic. Buried in my book of quotes, I think, there’s a Faulkner quote, something like, “The South has produced so many writers because they lost the war.” Attribution most certainly NOT fact-checked. (Do your own digging.)
The Guilty by Baldacci
It’s just a thriller. Crime novel. Not so novel crime, but a fresh approach. The were moments, pages, in the beginning where the Mississippi humidity and setting started to feel like a distinctly Southern Gothic set-piece, but once bullets start whizzing by?
The twist at the end is worthy of Southern epics.
The Guilty by Baldacci
The Guilty (Will Robie series)
#book
