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""One of the South's wildest new voices..." The Oxford American
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""One of the South's wildest new voices..." The Oxford American
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"Excerpted in publisher John Grisham's premiere Southern Literature magazine, The Oxford American...
| Twang. Keep careful. Twang. Watch your step. Out there, somewhere beyond Southern city lights, beyond Jehovah's land of milk and honey you could tumble into lost mountain hollows of smoke and gall. There you'll find them or, rather, they'll find you -- just rounding that curve, perhaps; in the long shadow of Old Riddle Top lies a spectral land, evershifting, leading you deeper into the darkling traces of shapes and souls who tell a host of interwoven tales, tales of hillbilly boogies, of holy mirth and madness and, finally, of gods and demons you never knew existed. This is Wicked Temper™.
Fable by fable, we meet a traveling executioner named O'Toole who bears false witness about his trade to an unnatural pinball waitress before steering his '66 Impala up into the hills of fiery redemption... Then we warm away a rainy mountain morning in Willy Birdnell's Feed, Fuel & Grain with a bewitched boy, a woodstove and a very hungry customer. Love lifts us up into snowy castles where a world-worn guitar picker finds the unexpected in an ageless spinster whose flesh must shun the light of day. With a passion, feverish and funny, a heartbroken lover flees homeward from his suburban trailerpark into the backwoods clutch of a big lusty bird. Elsewhere -- no, not just there, but hereabout, we'll trip over dopey Dobber and reap hellfire when we uncover the odd secrets of the hole and Dobber's head. An isle on a lost, mountain-locked lake welcomes a bitter scholar with webs of ghastly silence. A mouthless mythic joker thwarts a soldier's posse. A 300-pound princess pays a call early in the morning but late in the day. Much too late. And, very soon, we'll hitch a bad ride with young runaways Tizzy and Matthew who race headlong into an evil greater than their own. But should we tarry too long or wander afar....we're apt to run into the man named Nottingham whose name is only whispered, his hands, his face seldom seen. Sunlight surrenders to nightmare, waking or not; no one hears your holler save for that button of a girl in the tree. And she ain't telling.
Wicked Temper is a rockabilly epic, a folk tapestry, both old and new, stringing a dark strand from the highrisen cities and townships of the Biblical South into the blackest heart of a forgotten mountain region, a bloodstained place on no map to speak of, where time is a funny thing. Restless, like the haunting echoes of some hellhound's lament, Wicked Temper calls you to a homeplace that keeps your soul upon arrival....
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