Blackwood

January 1, 2020
Still bearing psychological scars from his childhood, Colburn, a junkyard sculptor, confronts the traumatic past when he returns to his hometown of Red Bluff, Mississippi. In 1956, when he was a boy, Colburn's unloving father hung himself--an act the son not only witnessed, but also abetted. Years later, when Colburn was a teenager, he learned from his mother that before his father's death, he had a baby brother who met a horrible fate due to his father's negligence--something that helped explain the suicide and made Colburn feel even more unwanted. In 1975, when Colburn returns to Red Bluff after years away, he is not the only lost soul drawing attention in the now-faded town. A disheveled man, woman, and boy living out of a dead Cadillac are committing strange and desperate acts that the veteran sheriff, Myer, can't begin to figure out. A married man who has obsessed over Celia, owner of the town bar, since grade school is pushed to the edge when she begins a complicated relationship with the taciturn Colburn--whose father, Colburn learns, consorted with Celia's fortunetelling mother. Unsettling, heartbreaking, and frequently astonishing, this Southern gothic never runs out of revelations. No mere metaphor in Smith's hands, the novel's ever present kudzu vines are a malevolent force, "strands of bondage" with the power to disappear people, cars, and entire houses, concealing ghostly caves and tunnels once dug by slaves. Such is the power of Smith's pitch-black poetic vision that the deeper you get into the book, the more entwined you are by its creeping effects. "It's like when something moves in the dark," says Myer. "You can't see it but you know it's there. I wonder if that's where we are." A gleaming, dark masterpiece by one of Southern fiction's leading voices.

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January 20, 2020
In Smith’s haunting, engrossing latest (after The Fighter), strangers awaken an evil force lurking in a small Southern town. In 1976 Red Bluff, Miss., storefronts are empty and boarded up after a long economic downturn. One humid summer, an unnamed man, woman, and boy arrive. While camping in a broken-down Cadillac under cover of creeping kudzu, the man hears whispers in the vines that drive him insane and cause him to kill the woman and cover himself in mud. After twin boys disappear, four lives intersect and secrets begin to emerge from 20 years earlier: Sheriff Myer, a man trying to forget the day he found a young boy staring at the hanged body of his father; Celia, a bar owner struggling with the scribbled psychic premonitions her dead mother left in a trunk; Colburn, a metal sculptor who returned to Red Bluff 20 years after he and Myer found Colburn’s father hanging; and the young boy from the Cadillac, on the run from the deranged man he arrived with. As the four enter the dark landscape, their dangerous search for the missing twins driven by a need for redemption, they confront an evil on a scale they’d never imagined. Smith’s meditation on the darkness of the human heart offers a moving update to the Southern gothic tradition.

Starred review from February 1, 2020
Through three earlier country noirs, all uncompromising, strangely poetic journeys into the Mississippi darkness, Smith has found ways to deepen his already opaque palette. Now, following The Fighter (2018), he goes still further, creating a town, Red Bluff, Mississippi, that is slowly being consumed by the malevolent kudzu vines on its outskirts, a kind of living quicksand capable of burying all trappings of civilization, from rusting cars to whole houses and, yes, stray people who wander into its tangled grasp. Metal sculptor Colburn knows he has no business returning to Red Bluff, where his father killed himself, but the offer of free rent in an abandoned storefront draws him back. "Punchdrunk from the past," he is soon entangled with the town's other lost souls, including bar owner Celia, who has her own connections to Colburn's family, and lawman Myer, who knows he is overmatched, both in the search for twin boys who have disappeared, the kudzu's latest victims, and in his quixotic stand against the forces of evil surrounding his town. Lurking over it all is a family of itinerant grifters?a version of Faulkner's Snopes clan, forces of chaos, human kudzu except for the youngest of them, a mysterious boy in whom Colburn sees his young self. As in the best noir, a soul-strangling inevitability hangs over Red Bluff, yet somehow Smith gives his doomed characters a dignity in the face of forces well beyond their control.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2019

Is it grit? Is it lit? Is it a thriller? As with the CWA Gold Dagger long-listed Desperation Road and the multi-best-booked Rivers, Smith's new work crosses boundaries. Junkyard sculptor Colburn has returned to played-out Red Bluff, MS, where the sheriff idealistically believes that people will act kindly to the down and out, even though fear and violence pervade the landscape like the ubiquitous kudzu. When Colburn enters a dense thicket in search of missing twin boys, he instead discovers his family's grim history.

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