Welcome to Heartland America circa right about now, when the union jobs and family farms that kept the white on the picket fences of towns like Winesburg, Ohio, have given way to meth labs, backwoods gunrunners, and bare-knuckle brawling. The results are, at the very least, never, ever boring.
Frank Bill's people are men and women pressed to the brink and beyond. There is Scoot McCutchen, whose beloved wife falls terminally ill, leaving him with nothing to live for which doesn't quite explain why he brutally murders her and her doctor and flees his hometown, or why, after years of running, he decides to turn himself in. Or in the title story, the fate of a man who's devolved from breeding hounds for hunting to training them for the dog-fighting ring intertwines with that of a Salvadoran gangbanger tasked with taking over the rural drug trade, but who mostly dreams of growing old in peace and quiet. As Crimes in Southern Indiana unfolds, we witness the unspeakable, yet are compelled to find sympathy for the depraved.
Frank Bill's southern Indiana is haunted with the deep and authentic sense of place that recalls the best of southern American fiction, but the interconnected stories bristle with the urban energy of a Chuck Palahniuk or latter-day Nelson Algren and rush with the slam-bang plotting of pulp noir crime writing. Frank Bill's prose is gritty yet literary, shocking and impossible to put down. His tough, searing vision is as singular as that of Cormac McCarthy or Jim Thompson, a dark evocation of the survivalist spirit of the American working class. This is a brilliant debut by an important new voice.
