Crimes in Southern Indiana

May 16, 2011
Bill's resolutely unsentimental debut collection lays bare working-class strife, exposing atrocities that are at once violently harrowing and desperately human. Pitchfork and Darnel Crase, the two brothers in "Hill Clan Cross," exact cruel revenge on their young kinfolk who've been busy skimming their drugs to sell on the side. In "These Old Bones," the boys' mother murders their father once she discovers he'd pimped out their granddaughter, Audry. Elsewhere, in "Officer Down (Tweakers)," Moon, a police officer whose wife leaves him, kills his estranged best friend who'd become involved in the meth business; in a companion story, menace waits for Ina, his cheating wife. The title story features more downtrodden, reckless men who bet on dogfights with embittered Afghanistan war veterans, then lose and commit even more desperate acts. Readers who enjoy coal-black rural noir are in for a sadistic treat: flowing like awful mud and written in pulpy style, these stories paint a grisly portrait of the author's homeland. You might want to have your brass knuckles handy when reading.

August 15, 2011

A dark, hard-boiled debut consisting of interconnected short stories.

No doubt about it, Bill can write. His sentences are terse and clipped: You'll feel as though some backwoods cracker has taken a break from cookin' meth or beatin' his wife to tell you these stories. It's a book without heroes, just a few reasonably decent people surrounded by others you'd want to scrape off the sole of your shoe. Redeeming qualities are rare in the characters, who have colorful names like Knee High, Pine Box and Pitchfork. Oh, and Dodo. Women are raped, brains are splattered and faces are sliced. A man gets his grandson whacked, bullet to the head, to teach that boy a lesson. Cross your kin, you wind up in Hill Clan Cross Cemetery, "where bad deals were made good and lessons were buried deep." A woman goads her husband to kill her father, who's always called her a whore. A guy skims cash from MS-13, Mara Salvatrucha, the most dangerous gang anywhere. A dicey idea at best. A woman leaves her husband, gets gang-raped, maybe gets even, maybe doesn't. Readers will be rapt or repelled by the fast pace and near-constant violence that makes James Lee Burke's books look like kiddy lit. The stories are well told, though, and will get the readers' adrenaline flowing, maybe the bile rising, too. Some characters appear in several of the stories, but the one constant thread is the setting. Ordinarily this might work well, but this collection would have benefited from having a central character the reader could root for. Most of the characters are simply bone-marrow bad, and their stories leave an acrid taste about the human condition.

Aficionados of crime writing likely will love the stories and their crackling excitement. Others, if they even finish the book, will at least appreciate the well-crafted prose.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2011

This gritty, violent debut collection begins rather like pulp genre fiction then deepens into something much more significant and powerful. Set in a dilapidated, seedy, nightmare version of southern Indiana, complete with meth labs, dog-fighting rings, and all manner of substance abuse, the stories are connected by recurring characters. The collection opens with vignettes focused mainly on carnage. But as readers go deeper, the stories lengthen, with Bill turning his attention to psychology and character development and bringing the community to life in fascinating ways. Many of the male protagonists are combat veterans, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and many of the characters--women as well as men--solve problems through lethal violence. Take Scoot McCutchen, who murders the wife he loves when she falls terminally ill. Bill's characters live in a fractured world where there are no good jobs, not much respect for life, and not much hope. It's a bleak, hard-boiled vision of America. VERDICT Recommended for fans of literary fiction but not for the faint of heart.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2011
There's raw power in this collection, but more power than grace, and precious little relief from bleakness. The opening story is arresting, with two drug dealers teaching their sons a bloody lesson about stealing from the family business. The next two stories seem to promise that these portraits of rural despair will be interconnected. But then the connections are severed. The stories become short, merciless bursts of sorrow, bad choices, and violence; of depravity and abuse; of people whose only solutions lie in guns, knives, fists, and fire. Bill has potential as a writer, but this debut may have come too soon. Similes can be overwrought and difficult to decipher (blood peeled like three-day-old biscuits). The line between the narrative voice and the characters' voices is porous. Dialogue is sometimes keenly pitched, other times caricaturish (done fried that brain of yours to plumb crazy). But, mostly, Bill tells us what he's shown us, explaining didactically that a veteran has been ruined by war. We understood that the moment he started cutting off ears.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)