A review by sagebrushnbooks
Blackwood by Michael Farris Smith

5.0

Too much fiction about the South, particularly about the rural South, either romanticizes it, or condescends to its residents. This is different. This is part crime and violence, part raw exploration of rural secret keeping, power motivations, and ballad of the overlooked. Michael Farris Smith shows his Mississippi roots brilliantly in gritty dialogue, in the kudzu that he expertly uses as metaphor, as near characterization, of the constant creep and entanglement of want and evil in every human soul. I have seen comparisons between Michael Farris Smith and Dennis Lehane, but I don't think the comparisons are fair. Lehane writes cop stories, where the focus is on wrapping up the crime in question with a neat and tidy end for the clever cop/detective who solves the case -- Sherlock Holmes with a bit more grit. Smith, on the other hand, is something different, better, more. There is no wrap up, no retribution, no salvation, no reason. Here, violence just is, part of the landscape, part of the human experience, and law enforcement is no more effective at tidying up the case than at abating the creeping kudzu.