Desperation Road

Michael Farris Smith

No Exit, £8.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

IN 2012, editors Brian Carpenter and Tom Franklin identified a strain within the genre of Southern Gothic they called “Grit Lit”. The term has been used to describe books by Harry Crews, James Lee Burke and Ron Rash, among others, and with Desperation Road Michael Farris could stake a credible claim to being one of its brightest new stars.

Set in Mississippi, Desperation Road is a crime novel split between dark nights on rural backroads where anything might happen and sweltering days irradiated by an unforgiving sun in which no one can stay hidden for long. Moments of respite are few and far between, and some never find them at all – like Maben, a mother who is running from a past of drug addiction and abuse with her young daughter, Annalee.

Having scrounged enough money to stay the night at a motel, she gets picked up on suspicion of soliciting in its parking lot by a cop who rapes her in the back of his patrol car. At the point when the cop phones his buddies to come and join in, Maben gets hold of his gun and shoots him. She makes her way back to the motel on foot, still carrying the incriminating gun.

That same day, Russell Gaines is released from an eleven-year sentence for smashing into another man’s vehicle and killing him while driving drunk, and heads back to his home town of McComb. The victim’s brothers are waiting for him, and beat him up as soon as he’s stepped off the bus. Gaines is left in little doubt that the beating is just a taste of what’s to come, and it’s unlikely to stop until he’s dead. Or until he kills them.

Filling us in on their backstories a little at a time, Smith builds up the suspense for the moment that Maben’s and Russell’s paths will finally cross and their plots intertwine. Could each be the key to what the other needs or, as seems more likely given the novel’s brooding atmosphere, will they bring about each other’s downfall?

These are hardened people facing tough challenges, and Smith resists any temptation to sentimentalise or sweeten, even when opportunities present themselves, his authorial voice as laconic as any of his characters. But there’s a genuine desire in Russell to atone for his past and start anew, and an instinctive realisation that this must begin in acts of compassion and kindness. At the same time, he pines for the life he might have had with his old sweetheart, now married and with children but still hanging on to memories of their time together. His father, however, is starting again, getting together with an undocumented Mexican woman, Consuela, following his wife’s death while Russell was in prison.

In amidst the pick-up trucks, guns, whisky, simmering resentments and hunger for vengeance, this is a gripping story of second chances, divided loyalties and a quest for redemption, taking place in a landscape that’s cruel but not entirely unforgiving.