Bone Dogs

January 25, 2010
Set amid the hardscrabble hills of West Virginia, Skipper’s third novel is a tour of trailer parks, lonely roads, and lost souls centering on Tuesday Price, a nom de guerre for downward-spiraling drunk Andrew Price. A brilliant outsider, Tuesday can’t hold a job or his life together, seeming determined to drink himself into an early grave. Constantly in the bag, Tuesday learns that Linda, his wife and sometimes trailer cohabitant, is unexpectedly pregnant, leading to his attempt to dry out and finally face a troubled past that includes a manic-depressive mother and a strict Pentecostal minister father. After another round of trouble, Tuesday lands in his deserted childhood home, intent on rebuilding it and himself. Skipper (The Baptism of Billy Bean
) moves easily in dark terrain, but he’s also conversant with redemption; the novel bears an odd sense of charm that has roots in authentic characters and Skipper’s ease of language. This is a flinty novel of troubled times for these troubled times.

April 15, 2010
A third Appalachian tale from Maryland resident Skipper (Tear Down the Mountain, 2006, etc.) finds Tuesday Price—equal parts modern-day Huck Finn and Huck Finn's drunk dad—struggling to escape the cruel snares of alcoholism and a guilt-ridden past.

Price's wife Linda was with him on that winding mountain road the night the body of his best friend Matt turned up run-over. Price, drunk, had fought with Matt earlier that night. Despite suspicious circumstances, evidence can't be found to convict Price, but the tragedy sets off a series of accusations that lead to his preacher father's being let go from the church and, as Price sees it, his death. When Linda leaves him, the loop of his self-pitying existence shrinks to include little more than Ace's Hole in the Wall Bar and his double-wide trailor. Enter Lilo, a silent old man stoically sitting out his days in a derelict pickup. When Lilo dies, Price discovers a dog chained behind the trailer, echoing the demise of Price's childhood pet after the disappearance of his depressive mother, an act of deliberate negligence and cruelty he cannot forgive. Apparitions of Lilo and the dead dog haunt Price as he tries to quit his boozing. Despite visits from old drinking buddies and the skunk-like taint of failure, Linda's pregnancy gives him the will-power to sober up and keep a job. Price is a runner, literally and figuratively, but run as he might on these coal-veined mountains, he can't outrun his mistakes. Soon enough he loses his job and goes back on the sauce, bottoming out when the facts and mysteries of his past pursue him to his abandoned childhood home where, tormented by naysaying demons, he obsessively labors to rebuild his parents' home. His only company a fallen preacher, a fire-brand old lady and a blind dog, Price hammers, saws, planes and plumbs his way toward penitence and forgiveness, discovering the truths and misinterpretations that have turned him again and again to the bottle. Will this flawed and frustrated narrator quell his pig-headed and self-destructive tendencies and win back the woman who loves him and carries his child? In pithy mountain vernacular, Price narrates a personal history written in the disappearing ink of whiskey. Vivid, caustic observations and an ear for dialogue breathe life into Skipper's characters, making them worthy of our sympathy.

With wit, impressive description and resonance to the commonalities of the human condition, this chronicle of a man struggling with himself holds interest even when the action slows and closes on the repeated missteps of a self-described sinner.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 15, 2010
Fifty-seven-year-old Tuesday Price says that everyone in Green County, West Virginia, despises him without reservation and states categorically that he has no intention of working steadily. Instead, he jogs, drinks too much Keystone Light, and falls down frequently. So his wife, Linda, leaves him. When she returns, she tells him shes pregnant, and Tuesday stops drinking, gets a job, and begins to regain some self-esteem. But Tuesday has lots more lumps to take before redemption. What made Tuesday lose his way makes up the largest part of this dark novel of love, loss, friendship, death, poverty, and religion in Appalachia. Skippers last novel (The Baptism of Billy Bean, 2009) was a surprising country-noir tale that featured remarkable and often hilarious dialogue. Bone Dogs is much darker and more serious. It offers ruefully funny dialogue, but the author has abandoned quotation marks and mixed dialogue into the narrative, forcing the reader to parse for understanding. That caveat aside, Tuesdays eventual redemption is worth the effort.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)