Twilight

In rural 1950s Tennessee, teenagers Kenneth and Corrie Tyler suspect their late bootlegger father didn’t receive a proper burial. After digging up his and other graves, they discover that well-to-do undertaker Fenton Breece has been defiling the dead. Armed with incriminating photos, they intend to blackmail him and ruin his reputation. Breece in turn hires Granville Sutter, a cunning, ill-tempered murderer, to recover the evidence. What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase through the barren backwoods.



About the worst that can be said for Twilight is that it has the misfortune of sharing its title with a series of poorly crafted vampire novels. But unlike Stephenie Meyer, William gay can actually write. His florid, intricate descriptions juxtaposed against plainspoken, quoteless dialogue call to mind Cormac McCarthy, but Gay is more innovator than imitator. Who else would be boldly transgressive enough to present a place where necrophiliacs and maniac killers are accepted as a matter of course?


Oozing with sinister tension, Twilight moves at a swift pace and builds character development along the way. Kenneth’s reluctance and fear make him a believable hero, while Breece is given a comic baffoonish quality to complement his depraved habits. The real star here though is Sutter. Like a white-trash Anton Chigurh, Sutter is self-aware, deceptively intelligent, and ruthlessly determined. One of the book’s more chilling moments occurs when he addresses a woman with a still-living husband as “widow Conkle,” knowing full well what he’ll do and how he’ll get away with it.


An unapologetically dark book, Twilight will alienate some with its cryptic downer of an ending. It remains, however, a well-crafted study of desperation and resolve, of Southern Gothic bogeymen and the decent folk who dare to defy them.


8.5/10