Poachers

An Edgar Award winner Tom Franklin''s Poachers collects ten stunning bleak tales set in the woodlands swamps and chemical plants along the Alabama River.Staking his claim as a fresh original Southern voice Tom Frankin''s lyric deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence a world of hunting and fishing gambling and losing drinking and poaching—a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And as a weathered hand-painted sign reads: Jesus is not coming. This terrain isn''t pretty isn''t for the weak of heart but in these deperate lost people Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human. While he may occasionally wax sentimental about life in the impoverished South Franklin''s style is often as laconic and simply spoken as his characters'' dialogue sometimes close to Hemingway but more often akin to Denis Johnson or Raymond Carver in its resonant ordinariness. —Publishers Weekly