Synopses & Reviews
It's 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by a scabrous and malevolent character called E. O. Smonk. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. He abhors horses, goats and the Irish. Every Saturday night for a year he's been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men — all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over and under rifle. At last the desperate citizens of the town, themselves harboring a terrible secret, put Smonk on trial, with disastrous and shocking results.
Thus begins the highly anticipated new novel from Tom Franklin, acclaimed author of Hell at the Breech and Poachers. Smonk is also the story of Evavangeline, a fifteen-year-old prostitute quick to pull a trigger or cork. A case of mistaken identity plunges her into the wild sugarcane country between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, land suffering from the worst drought in a hundred years and plagued by rabies. Pursued by a posse of unlikely vigilantes, Evavangeline boats upriver and then wends through the dust and ruined crops, forced along the way to confront her own clouded past. She eventually stumbles upon Old Texas, where she is fated to E. O. Smonk and the townspeople in a way she could never imagine.
In turns hilarious, violent, bawdy and terrifying, Smonk creates its own category: It's a southern, not a western, peopled with corrupt judges and assassins, a cuckolded blacksmith, Christian deputies, widows, War veterans, whores, witches, madmen and zombies. By the time the smoke has cleared, the mystery of Smonk will be revealed, the survivors changed forever.
Review
"Highly entertaining....Some sensitive readers may want to run screaming from the house, but those with a strong stomach for graphic death and sex will be smitten with Smonk." USA Today
Review
"Horror and history rendered with gusto and buckets of blood." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"This tale, in which every man is a monster and every woman is a whore, a witch, or both, comes to an explosive...climax that brings a strange sort of redemption....Recommended only for the strong of stomach." Library Journal
Review
"Writing in a profane, no-quotation-marks dialogue mode that mixes William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and Deadwood's David Milch. (Grade: A-)" Entertainment Weekly
Synopsis
The author of Poachers and Hell at the Breech delivers a bawdy, inventive tale, set in Alabama in the early 1900s, that combines the gritty edge of Quentin Tarantino and the outrageous humor of Christopher Moore.
About the Author
Tom Franklin is the author of Hell at the Breech and Poachers. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, and their three children. He teaches at the University of Mississippi.