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A review by rebus
Blackwood by Michael Farris Smith
2.0
Another boring hack with an MFA who has no understanding of the world, Smith has crafted a book aiming to sell large numbers to the equally dimwitted upper middle class who can't see anything outside of their own bubble (not to mention that most violent crime is not of this type).
It's filled with far too much description of boring minutiae, repeating over and over that certain characters took drags on cigarettes or pulls of beer, because there really isn't all that much happening here (the blank pages and fancy depictions of kudzu--when he isn't turning it into something from a bad genre like magical realism to call it evil and tie it to certain characters--on virtually every chapter heading drop the page count closer to 215). The pace is brisk despite such lugubrious writing, though it may be worse when he mixes metaphors and waxes on so often about "hillsides lathered in light" instead of maintaining coherence. It also seems to come to a very sudden and quite unsatisfying conclusion. so it fails in terms of style and plot, and has a confusing mix of religious and pagan ideology sprinkled in to no effect.
Thematically, it's an Oprah book because 'Oh! The children' and it additionally takes a Reagan like tone about crime, seeming to have more sympathy for the cops who think they are boss in every small town (when they're the fascists). It's also very judgmental about the lower classes while attempting to virtue signal empathy towards them, with assumptions that that is where all crime is derived and that they should be happy with charity, using violent descriptors for their actions, while using more euphemistic terms for the violent actions of the upper classes (though there really is no discussion of how class really affects things) or those in authority.
As the great Derek Raymond once quipped through one of his characters: 'anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle class lifestyle will never write anything but crap.' He meant that for Michael Farris Smith and nearly every writer from the last 30 some years (since they all have MFAs), which have produced no great writers and not even a handful of good ones (not to mention all of the bad genre literature). It's Stewart O'Nan for the dumb kids who didn't take college Literature classes.
It's filled with far too much description of boring minutiae, repeating over and over that certain characters took drags on cigarettes or pulls of beer, because there really isn't all that much happening here (the blank pages and fancy depictions of kudzu--when he isn't turning it into something from a bad genre like magical realism to call it evil and tie it to certain characters--on virtually every chapter heading drop the page count closer to 215). The pace is brisk despite such lugubrious writing, though it may be worse when he mixes metaphors and waxes on so often about "hillsides lathered in light" instead of maintaining coherence. It also seems to come to a very sudden and quite unsatisfying conclusion. so it fails in terms of style and plot, and has a confusing mix of religious and pagan ideology sprinkled in to no effect.
Thematically, it's an Oprah book because 'Oh! The children' and it additionally takes a Reagan like tone about crime, seeming to have more sympathy for the cops who think they are boss in every small town (when they're the fascists). It's also very judgmental about the lower classes while attempting to virtue signal empathy towards them, with assumptions that that is where all crime is derived and that they should be happy with charity, using violent descriptors for their actions, while using more euphemistic terms for the violent actions of the upper classes (though there really is no discussion of how class really affects things) or those in authority.
As the great Derek Raymond once quipped through one of his characters: 'anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle class lifestyle will never write anything but crap.' He meant that for Michael Farris Smith and nearly every writer from the last 30 some years (since they all have MFAs), which have produced no great writers and not even a handful of good ones (not to mention all of the bad genre literature). It's Stewart O'Nan for the dumb kids who didn't take college Literature classes.