The Lost Country

By: William Gay

Narrated by: T. Ryder Smith

Billy Edgewater is a harbinger of doom. Estranged from his family, discharged from the Navy, and touched by a rising desperation, he sets out hitchhiking home to East Tennessee, where his father is slowly dying.

On the road, separately, are Sudy and Bradshaw, brother and sister, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish. All, in one way or another, have their pasts and futures embroiled with D.L. Harkness, a predator in all the ways there are. Hounded at every turn by scams, vigilantes, grievous loss, and unspeakable violence, Edgewater navigates the long road home, searching for a place that may be nothing but memory.

©2018 William Gay (P)2018 Recorded Books Inc

Hardscrabble

Liked the writing mostly . Maybe a bit repetitive in terms of the events narrative. But honest likely autobiographical

Grab ya by the short hairs and shake you silly

I have to think on this one a minute or several in order to articulate my experience of this story, perhaps most especially the fore and after words which were fascinating and ponderable for days. Humans are just so peculiar and tragic.

Gritty

Filled with grit and hard scrabble lives. Love the way he writes , pure poetry in so many chapters had to rewind many times to hear it again. You can hear, smell and and feel revulsion along with the writer . I’ll just what else is available to read more of him. Grateful someone took the time to publish.

The Stranger Meets Southern Gothic

Like Camus' Meursault in The Stranger, The Lost Country's Billy Edgewater is morally agnostic, drifting where the world takes him, meeting up with colorful characters like the one-armed Roosterfish and the ne'r do well Buddy Bradshaw. And while every sentence of The Lost Country is near poetry--prepare yourself for a long journey to nowhere. Please understand, that's not a complaint, the journey can indeed be the destination and in this, my first exposure to William Gay, ironically reading his last posthumously published work, first, I'm happy to go for a meandering ride. Gay's fearsome talents lie in his power of description and rich vocabulary, which can be described as Faulkneresque. And he brings both his characters and 1950s Tennessee into sharp relief. There's also a great forward and afterword, by Gay's friend J.M. White about piecing together the mystery of the lost manuscript.

Like finding old friends.

A walk in the woods. A lost trail discovered. Climbing a rise to adventures as of yet untapped, even undiscovered. A view so clear as can be described as nothing less than a life changing epiphany. I will not be able to resist returning over and over again.