After a bit of unconventional exploration in the town’s local graveyard, Kenneth and Corrie Tyler discover that their bootlegging father wasn’t actually buried in the casket that they had paid for. Fuelled by curiosity, the siblings subsequently learn that their father wasn’t the only victim of the local undertaker, Fenton Breece as the rest of the town’s dead are also either missing, their caskets containing weighty amounts of garbage, or they have been significantly altered in death from what they had been in life. Judging by the grotesquely manipulated corpses, ranging from eunuchs to in-afterlife-only couples, laid to rest forever in some morbid display of demented perversion, the fate of the missing can only be shuddered at.
Hell bent on revenge and personal financial gain, Corrie convinces Kenneth that the photographic evidence they now have in their possession should be used to bribe the grisly undertaker for a good deal of money, instead of being handed over to the local police that have a reputation for corruptness. With Corrie convinced that the rich undertaker would manage to wriggle away from justice with only a suspended license and a quick stint in a psychiatric ward, she persuades Kenneth that they may as well get something out of it – a new life in the city.
Inevitably, Corrie’s plan backfires when Breece hires renowned maniac, Granville Sutter to retrieve the photographs for him instead of coughing up the cash. With a murdered sister to fuel his conviction, Kenneth Tyler must first outrun Sutter in a twisted game of cat and mouse through the eerie Harrikin forests, in order to reach the law-abiding law enforcement in the next town.
An old mining location, the Harrikin is rife with perils from rusted machinery in sinister states of decay to overgrown mining shafts, all long abandoned and left remaining as homage to past industrial glory. And only those who can’t move on from those lost times dwell in its depths, a sprinkling of characters detached from modern society. With only a broken shotgun for a companion, Kenneth must navigate his way through the tangled woods and encounter its unconventional inhabitants of whom some will aid him and some will hinder him as he tries to outrun and outsmart the blood-crazed Sutter.
I was shopping with a friend when I first picked up Twilight from the “New Releases” stand in Waterstones. After quickly perusing the book’s covers and discovering the authors photo, her first comment was “he looks like he’s got a good story in him”. With the hard-set, life-lined face and ragged hair of William Gay starring out at me, I couldn’t have agreed more. This fellow certainly looked like he could weave a darkly constructed tale rooted in America’s deep south with haunting sincerity. Despite not usually being one for horror or anything of a flesh desecrating nature, the copy’s promise of a Southern gothic fairytale with eccentric squatters, old men and witches, coupled with Gay’s “good storyteller” looks had me enticed.
After completing Twilight, I’ll deduce that William Gay did have a good story in him but it wasn’t quite the one I was expecting. It’s definitely southern and definitely gothic but fairytale and witches were certainly misleading descriptions, with the overall effect strictly dark humoured thriller. For me, the first half of the book is more prominent than the second, where Kenneth enters the Harrikin with Sutter hot on his trail. It was at this point I was expecting the fairytale element to kick in and an array of dazzlingly peculiar characters to explode off the pages. Though the inhabitants of the Harrikin are typically deep south and detached from modern American society I felt slightly let down by their lack of mythical qualities and major involvement in the plot. This may have been because I was expecting something more along the lines of Terry Gilliams “Tidelands” than what is fundamentally a good old scary woods chase between Tyler and Sutter. This is by no means to say the story is a disappointment on the whole though, just not what I was personally expecting – those with a preference for thrillers over folklore and the supernatural will not be disappointed.
It’s also not as gruesome as I’d thought it would be. Sure, the word painted images of Fenton Breece holding polite dinner conversation with a girl he’s stuffed and embalmed are disturbing but Gay injects just enough humour in the prose to take the edge off any revulsion that may be congealing in your stomach. Instead of portraying Breece as a sinister character, it’s only his actions that are; the man himself is rather pathetic and pitiful, removing any glamorisation and mystery so often associated with characters in this subject matter.
Whatever personal faults or let downs I found with the story itself cannot be mirrored in Gay’s writing ability. Gay is a wordsmith of the highest order and writes with such fluidity and controlled prose it is nigh on impossible to find anything to criticise. As a master of metaphor and simile, Gay’s narrative is astoundingly imaginative, almost poetic in its form, yet always accessible and not contrived.
One point of contention I have with Twilight is the formatting, or more appropriately, the lack of. Gay has a peculiar aversion to speech marks which makes it hard to distinguish between narrative and dialogue. Not only do I find this bordering on pretension but also mildly irritating. Granted you get use to it after a while but it doesn't exactly help the flow when you are constantly double taking to check if a sentence has come out of a character's mouth or the author's. Along with inverted commas, Gay also appears to have a dislike for chapters. I'd settle for chapter-less if I was at least provided with some page breaks, but alas, they also seem to be on Gay's hit list. Not as annoying as the camouflaged dialogue but unless you are particularly organised with book marks finding your place again can prove irksome.
I would recommend Twilight for Gay’s writing style alone (ignoring the formatting) but there is also plenty to be admired in the story itself. Despite being disappointed in the characters of the Harrikin, this is not to say the others are not of substance. Sutter is frighteningly convincing as the hired heavyweight with a demented and unaffected disposition and Fenton Breece is also complex in his conflicting personality traits and pastimes. Overall an original thriller, but don’t be mislead by the copy on the cover.
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