Where All Light Tends to Go

January 5, 2015
North Carolina memoirist Joy (Growing Gills) sets his gripping first novel in his native Appalachia. Jacob McNeely, the 18-year-old son of a meth-addicted mother and a sociopathic father who operates a drug ring, has always believed he can’t transcend his roots. But when his childhood sweetheart, Maggie Jennings, graduates from high school, she asks him to leave the mountains with her, and he begins to envision a life free of his family legacy. Threats to his father’s business provoke violence, however, ensnaring Jacob in murder and betrayal even as he plans his escape. Despite his recreational drug use and propensity for violence, he has a capacity for selfless love that will keep readers invested in his struggle. Some Appalachian clichés and repetitive descriptions don’t detract from the tragic, absorbing plot. Engaging characters, a well-realized setting, and poetic prose establish Joy as a novelist worth watching. Agent: Julia Kenny, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.

January 1, 2015
The father's a killer, the mother's an addict, and the son's just plain trapped in this blunt-force account of an Appalachian family.Charlie McNeely controls the lucrative crystal meth business in his neck of the woods; his estranged wife, Laura, is one of his customers. The work involves killing; real men kill, and the rest are pussies, according to Charlie. Having cops on his payroll provides protection. With bad McNeely blood in his veins, the self-loathing 18-year-old Jacob sees himself as trash. Two years earlier, he broke up with his childhood sweetheart, Maggie, not wanting to drag her into the abyss. Now Jacob is facing a manhood test Daddy has set up. (As narrator, he calls his parents Daddy and Mama.) Robbie Douglas, an employee, has snitched and must be disposed of. In the deep-woods shack, he finds the Cabe brothers, also employees, have Robbie tied up and bleeding. The brothers splash him with sulfuric acid and leave him for dead on the mountainside. It was a sloppy job. Robbie is found, unconscious but alive. Now it's the Cabes' turn. Big Daddy beats them bloody, shoots them and has Jacob help him dump them in the lake. Jacob is now accessory to two, maybe three murders, and his situation becomes even more dire when he discovers his blood-soaked Mama, who has shot herself at his Daddy's urging. Still, there's a glimmer of hope when Maggie, who is a Good Woman, returns to him, saying "You're the strongest man I know." Might Jacob overcome his fatalism? Joy struggles with that, just as he struggles to give complexity to that dead-eyed evildoer of a father, but he ultimately finds it simplest to obey his first commandment: Shed blood. A dark semiautobiographical first novel in which action flourishes at the expense of character development.

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February 15, 2015
Joy's first novel is an uncompromising noir, its downward thrust pulling like quicksand on both the characters and the reader. And, yet, there is poetry here, too, as there is in Daniel Woodrell's novels, the kind of poetry that draws its power from a doomed character's grit in the face of disaster. And Jacob McNeely, the son of a meth dealer in hardscrabble North Carolina, is surely doomed, as is his stoned mother and even his all-powerful father. It's only a question of what form that doom will take: Will Jacob continue to be enslaved to his father, or will he attempt to break away when the world tells him no escape is possible? Answering questions like that is what keeps noir fans coming back for more. In Jacob's case, it's also listening to him think about his girlfriend, Maggie, who just might have a way out: We just stood there with that June sun beating down on us, both of us lost, but only her having somewhere to go. Joy, on the other hand, definitely has a place to go. This is the start of a very promising fiction-writing career.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2014

Joy's first novel after publishing stories and creative nonfiction in publications like Drafthorse Literary Journal is billed as Appalachian noir (Joy's term) and, alternately, Winter's Bone meets Breaking Bad. You can see why: in Cashiers, NC, killing a man is a rite of passage for the meth-dealing McNeely family, but when 18-year-old Jacob blows his chance, he must decide between placating his angry father and abandoning the mountains with the girl he loves. NPR interviews in the offing.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2015

Upon turning 16, Jacob McNeely drops out of high school to work for his father, who runs a meth ring in the mountains of western North Carolina. A few years later, he is tasked with disposing of Robbie--one of his father's meth suppliers--but the killing is botched when Robbie is found, barely alive. At the same time, Jacob's attempt at rekindling his relationship with ex-girlfirend Maggie is thwarted when he is arrested for assaulting Maggie's new boyfriend. Tension escalates among the McNeely family members as Jacob's father becomes paranoid that Robbie will squeal to the cops about Jacob's role. VERDICT Readers of Southern grit lit in the tradition of Daniel Woodrell and Harry Crews will enjoy this fast-paced debut thriller by the author of Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman's Journey. Fan of Ron Rash's novels will appreciate the intricate plot and Joy's establishment of a strong sense of place in his depiction of rural Appalachia.--Russell Michalak, Goldey-Beacom Coll. Lib., Wilmington, DE

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2015

Upon turning 16, Jacob McNeely drops out of high school to work for his father, who runs a meth ring in the mountains of western North Carolina. A few years later, he is tasked with disposing of Robbie--one of his father's meth suppliers--but the killing is botched when Robbie is found, barely alive. At the same time, Jacob's attempt at rekindling his relationship with ex-girlfirend Maggie is thwarted when he is arrested for assaulting Maggie's new boyfriend. Tension escalates among the McNeely family members as Jacob's father becomes paranoid that Robbie will squeal to the cops about Jacob's role. VERDICT Readers of Southern grit lit in the tradition of Daniel Woodrell and Harry Crews will enjoy this fast-paced debut thriller by the author of Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman's Journey. Fan of Ron Rash's novels will appreciate the intricate plot and Joy's establishment of a strong sense of place in his depiction of rural Appalachia.--Russell Michalak, Goldey-Beacom Coll. Lib., Wilmington, DE

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.