Synopses & Reviews
In Daniel Woodrell's fiction, how the world sees you is how you come to see yourself. Failure is built in, and violence, petty crime, and jailtime are the common coin.
Shuggie Atkins is a lonely fat boy of thirteen. His mother, Glenda, teases him with her sexual provocations. His father, Red, is a brutal man with a short fuse who mocks and despises his son. Into this mix comes Jimmy Vin Pearce with his shiny green T-Bird and his impeccably smart clothes. It isn't long before he and Glenda begin a torrid affair. What follows is violent, shocking, and completely unpredictable -- except that it is totally foreordained.
The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell's darkest novel, is raw and disturbing and wholly original.
Review
"Stunningly accomplished....[Woodrell] has achieved near mastery of style: language, plot, characterization, and theme mesh with a seamless power....The Death of Sweet Mister triumphs in the acuity of its psychological insight into the lethal manifestations of incestuous jealousy....Woodrell is one of the most intense and accomplished practitioners [of the crime novel] since Jim Thompson....If Jim Thompson is dime-store Dostoyevsky, Daniel Woodrell is a less highfalutin Faulkner." Michael Anderson, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"The Death of Sweet Mister holds its own against anything in the canon of American literature. One does not often meet, one very rarely meets, a child narrator with the strength of voice and character and sheer humanity of this boy. My heart constantly ached for him -- I wanted to take him on. But at the same time, Mr. Woodrell keeps the story, at each turn, fiercely opposed to sympathetic, pathetic longings that would reduce the narrative to anything less than a powerful and brave and true piece of American literature. This is a book I'd place alongside Faulkner's The Reivers or Hemingway's 'Big Two-Hearted River.'" Kaye Gibbons, author of Ellen Foster
Review
"With Daniel Woodrell's new novel, the sole inventor of country noir has written another classic. At once satiric and considerate, violent and humane, The Death of Sweet Mister turns the petty crimes and vices of his poor Ozark whites into a strangely poignant drama that's as stunning and evocative as ancient Greek tragedy." Ron Hansen, author of Atticus
Review
"Woodrell's Ozarks are cut as cleanly as Flannery O'Connor's Georgia and pocked with characters just as volatile and proud and unpredictable." Chicago Tribune
Review
"If one is tempted to hear echoes of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, or Andrew Lytle in [his] themes, no matter. Mr. Woodrell isn't imitating any of them. He's only drawing from the same well they did, but with a different take, a different voice, a sharper sense of irony and satire." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Woodrell's South, like his prose, is complex and ironic; it is as beautiful and full of love as it is violent and self-destructive." The Bloomsbury Review
Synopsis
A southern gothic tale of the events that tear at a dysfunctional family whena slick stranger comes to visit.
Description
Powerful, disturbing, and raw-the last in Daniel Woodrell's Ozark trilogy and also his darkest novel, its voices coming straight out of the Missouri hill country that is its setting.
"Woodrell's South, like his prose, is complex and ironic; it is as beautiful and full of love as it is violent and self-destructive."
-The Bloomsbury Review
In Daniel Woodrell's fiction, how the world sees you is how you come to see yourself. Failure is built in, and violence, petty crime, and jailtime are the common coin.
Shuggie Atkins is a lonely fat boy of thirteen. His mother, Glenda, teases him with her sexual provocations. His father, Red, is a brutal man with a short fuse who mocks and despises his son. Into this mix comes Jimmy Vin Pearce with his shiny green T-Bird and his impeccably smart clothes. It isn't long before he and Glenda begin a torrid affair. What follows is violent, shocking, and completely unpredictable-except that it is totally foreordained.
About the Author
DANIEL WOODRELL is the author of six novels, including the New York Times Notable Books Give Us a Kiss and Tomato Red, which won the PEN West Fiction Award in l998. Though often compared to William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell, he is in fact an original. As The New York Times Book Review wrote, "He's only drawing from the same well they did, but with a different take, a different voice, a sharper sense of irony." Woodrell lives in West Plains, Missouri.