The southern gothic genre takes great pleasure in the grotesque and the eerie. While Twilight, William Gay’s third novel, happily belongs to that category, the author’s muscular phrasing and vivid imagination give this dark fable – a Tennessee-based “Hansel and Gretel” without the gingerbread sweetness – a life of its own.
Down on their luck, siblings Kenneth and Corrie Tyler try to blackmail undertaker Fenton Breece, a particularly gruesome pervert. The plan backfires and Kenneth is chased into the local woods by Breece’s hired thug, Granville Sutter. In true fairy-tale style, the woods are populated by funny old men and even funnier old women (one of them being a witch), whom Kenneth and Sutter meet en route to their inevitable confrontation. If there is a dreamlike, fantastical element to the novel, it is also hard and moral: the title references the very limits of human behaviour, as murder and necrophilia cast a lengthy shadow over proceedings.
Gay’s writing style – strange, lush, not easy to grasp – is as dense as the world he portrays. Yet the long, unpunctuated sentences are by no means “difficult”; somehow the author controls the weight of each line before it totters out of control. The effect, despite the horror, is hypnotic.
