William Gay

William Gay’s strain of Southern fiction is a nearly perfect blend of the dark and the comic. A ferocious stylist with a flair for the sinister and the forsaken, he deserves both a cult and a wider audience. While it isn’t hard to pin down his influences, Gay is less baroque than Faulkner, looser than Cormac McCarthy, and funnier and more steeped in the blues than either. Gay’s new novel—his third—is (like most of his work) set in his native Tennessee and features a suspect undertaker, grave robbers, bootleggers, blackmail, and necrophilia. In other words, Twilight is hard-boiled gothic literature that makes most contemporary Southern fiction look like Bailey White’s lost screenplay for Smokey and the Bandit IV.