Twilight, by William Gay
A word of warning: William Gay's third novel Twilight isn't for the faint-hearted, so don't bother with it if you can't stomach necrophilia, grave-robbery, and some gruesome beatings and murders. Billed as a southern-gothic fairy tale, the story is set in 1950's Tennessee and opens with sister and brother Corrie and Kenneth Tyler's discovery that something is amiss with their recently-buried father's grave and that the foul, creepy undertaker Fenton Breece likely has something to do with it. Their father was a legendary bootlegger and abusive drunk but the Tylers are respectful of his memory, so they begin a graveyard-investigation to find out what Breece is up to.
Their detective work leads them to reveal evil on a more massive scale than they've ever encountered. The duo contacts authorities with evidence against Breece but are shunned because of their low-class standing, so they decide to blackmail the undertaker and escape the town forever. Naturally, Breece strikes back by sending the sinister town-thug—a known murderer named Granville Sutter—after them, forcing Kenneth to flee to the mysterious Harrikin woods, with the goal of reaching a safer town on the other side.
The chase through the Harrikin is where Gay's storytelling and descriptive skills are most evident. Here, Kenneth encounters various backwoods folks (a fierce old coot, a witch) and these passages showcase his lyricism and dynamic, true dialogue. This is also where the good-versus-evil themes hit their stride; in one chilling scene, the witch suggests that in Kenneth's stirring up of the world's wickedness, he "got it on you, ain't ye?"
The hunt eventually comes to a climax and Sutter catches up with Kenneth, which is where Gay makes an egregious decision in terms of plot believability. The Harrikin portion preceding was so well-rendered that you're looking for a cleverly hellfire-and-brimstone scene but instead you're in the realm of Scooby-Doo. It's a huge disappointment and knocks this otherwise original and gorgeously, (if gruesomely) executed book down a few fatal notches.
