Deep Winter

December 9, 2013
At the start of Gailey’s relentlessly tragic debut, Danny Bedford—fat, mentally slow, and considered harmless by most folks in the small town of Wyalusing, Pa.—discovers Mindy Knolls’s battered body in her trailer on her birthday in 1984. Alternating points-of-view include those of aging and weary Sheriff Lester; befuddled, good-hearted Danny; swaggering deputy sheriff Mike Sokowski, who’s also the town drunk; alcoholic state trooper Bill Taggart; and Mindy’s revenge-minded twin brothers, Scott and Skeeter Knolls. In this isolated, winter-frozen community, where “everybody around here always carries a firearm,” a dispirited and confused Danny, suspected of Mindy’s murder, wanders the woods while some hunt to capture and others to kill him. Some townspeople doubt his guilt, but few are willing to stand up for him. The multiplicity of voices isn’t always successful, but Gailey molds them to form a moving picture of a man, often referred to as “retard,” who becomes a moral compass. Agent: Natasha Alexis, Zachary Schuster Harmsworth.

January 15, 2014
Screenwriter Gailey's first novel owes a tip of the hat to John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Danny, a gentle giant with a tragic past that's responsible for his mental challenges, lives in a tiny, bare room over a laundromat in Wyalusing, Pa. The business's owner allows Danny to live there and pays him a small stipend for keeping the premises clean and handling day-to-day issues. It's not a plush life, but Danny, whose parents died when he was a little boy, leaving him to the mercy of his vicious uncle, doesn't ask for or expect much. And that's a good thing, since Wyalusing holds some of the nastiest people ever to congregate in one place. The worst of the worst is a deputy named Mike Sokowski who, in terms of sheer evil, makes Charles Manson seem like a choirboy. Mike's former girlfriend Mindy, waitress and all-around nice person, is friends with Danny; in fact, Mindy is about the only friend Danny has. Although Danny's situation in life is through no fault of his own, adults in Wyalusing teach their children to ignore and even abuse the big man. Sokowski is at the front of that line, and one night, following a fight at a party that gets out of hand, he and a friend pay a visit to Mindy that results in her death, for which he frames Danny. What follows is a race to pin the crime on the innocent man by some of the most odious characters this side of the Evil Empire, including an extraneous drunken state police officer. Gailey writes visually, rendering the characters and action both vivid and alive. But his townsfolk behave so shamefully toward Danny, and the villain is so despicable, that the book often reads more like a fairy tale than a novel. Gailey's writing is the saving grace in this tale of good versus evil.

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January 1, 2014
This is a harsh, brutal novel, as bleak as its wintertime setting. It's also so brilliantly done, so artfully underwritten with not a word wasted, that readers may hate themselves for letting this grim narrative trap them in its coils. Danny, a big, slow-witted pudding of a man, comes across the naked body of the only woman who has ever been nice to him. Everyone believes Danny killed her, but we know who did: a mean drunk who is actually the town's deputy sheriff. We saw it happen, in nine pages of can't-look-away viciousness. The deputy knows how to play on the townspeople's gullibility, and he organizes a posse to hunt the simpleton. Interesting turn: one of the trackers is the sheriff, who's been lazily using the deputy's cruelty to keep the locals in line. The old man's guilt, plus his spotting of a detail that shouldn't be there, begins the exposure of the deception. But not before Wild Turkey has been drunk, shotguns have gone off, and innocents blasted to pieces, all in crystalline prose.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)