Poachers: Stories
By Tom Franklin
4/5
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Currently unavailable
About this ebook
In ten stunning and bleak tales set in the woodlands, swamps and chemical plants along the Alabama River, Tom Franklin stakes his claim as a fresh, original Southern voice. His lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poaching-a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella (selected for the anthologies New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best Mystery Stories of the Century), three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: "Jesus is not coming." This terrain isn't pretty, isn't for the weak of heart, but in these deperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human.
Tom Franklin
Tom Franklin is the New York Times bestselling author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger Award. His previous works include Poachers, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk. He teaches in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.
Read more from Tom Franklin
Poachers: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Smonk: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hell at the Breech: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Poachers
87 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is my 2nd Tom Franklin book and I am a believer. This collection of short stories was his first book. This is a dark book about life in Southwest Alabama populated by people who can sometimes be characterized by the term "white trash". Franklin delves into their lives and portrays a world that I know exists but does not touch mine on any level. He does a great job of making you feel the underbelly of life in the South or at least this part of the south. These stories are not happy and there is lots of violence but they will keep your interest. A very good first book and having read "Hell at the Breach" he certainly has developed into an excellent novelist. Someone to latch onto.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Someone told me the other day that William Gay had passed away. That momentary deflation I associate with the death of familiar artists left me pondering legacy and contemporaries. It would prove approapirate to assemble my own introspection. I always felt that Gay was improvising; he was an autodidact channeling a lifetime of fractured stories. Tom Franklin took the pitch as if he owned it. The stories here establish his talent as one for the ages.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5have read through half of this book, and although i like Tom Franklin style of writing, i am a little put off by these stories. Too much hunting, killing cats and other domestic animals.I realize these are stories of back woods Alabama, and all this is a fact of life for some folks who live there, but i dont enjoy reading about animals being tortured and killed just for the hell of it.Too bad, Mr Franklin could not come up with better story lines.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Franklin's first book, a collection of ten stories, is engrossing from start to finish. Even when writing the type of literary short story that doesn't really have a plot, his characters and observations ring so true that the stories still succeed. Although I hail from Alabama myself, the part of the state Franklin writes about is still a blank space for most Alabama residents. Lying in the no-man's land between Interstate highways, it has a character all its own. While this collection doesn't have the no-holds-barred intensity of Smonk, the first of Franklin's books I read, it will still leave you wanting more. The individual stories sort of blend together, to leave you with a memorable picture of swamps, chemical plants, and the other wonders of Southwest Alabama. Reading Franklin, you have to believe that some people were born to write.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A rare collection of consistently brilliant writing. The stories are set in rural southern Alabama--to me a foreign and exotic place--with such absorbing detail that I felt like swatting mosquitoes off the back of my neck as I read.The prose hooks from the first word and propels the reader, bumping and scratching through dirt roads and swamps, to each story's poignant conclusion, while even minor characters burst into life with the intensity of a match igniting.My favorites were the majestic foreword, the opening story, "Grit", and the title story, "Poachers". But I nevertheless enjoyed every story in this book, which is better than I can say for most short story collections.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories By Tom Franklin Harper Collins, 192 pgs0-688-17771-9Rating: Read This Book!Poachers is a collection of 11 short stories. I have gone back to my roots with this one. I "discovered" American regional short fiction 20 years ago and my favorite region is the south. It's all so very Gothic. Spanish moss and kudzu, Appalachia and Gulf coast, alligator and Thoroughbred, Pentecostal and voodoo priestess, plantation and slave quarter. One gets the idea that the primeval is alive and lurking in Mississippi. The juxtapositions of the South are mind-boggling and Tom Franklin captures them superbly. Mr. Franklin is a talent on the same plane with the late Larry Brown, and both are heirs to Faulkner.These are my favorite stories:The Ballad of Duane Juarez is about the dissolution of an older brother who has to rely on (or mooch off of) his younger brother's life. These are some of the things Duane accepts and/or takes from his brother Ned: food, drink, rent, Playboy, girls, jobs, electricity. According to Duane he married for love and Ned married for money. Duane's wife divorced him and so the love went away and their was still no money. Ned is still married and still has money so he tries to "help" his big brother Duane. I get the idea Ned sort of likes this arrangement. He doesn't seem to be intentionally belittling, but his off-hand remarks could be seen as casually cruel, as he tosses crumbs to Duane in the form of day-labor assignments. Some of the things that Ned has Duane do for him include: mowing grass, raking leaves, washing his car, cleaning houses, killing cats. Yep, killing cats. Ned's wife Nina feeds a bunch of stray cats and they won't go away. Ned hates the cats and pays Duane to capture them, take them off and shoot them. We find out how Duane feels about the people in his life when he takes the cats off to be summarily executed and starts naming them. This story is not a story with a plot, but is a character study. We get to peer around inside Duane's head, and he needs a good therapist.Poachers is the story of the 3 Gates brothers living in the backwoods of Alabama, who make their living as poachers. There's apparently nothing they won't kill and sell. This includes: fish, deer, dogs, rabbits, possums, turtle, fox. The brothers sell and barter (sometimes for moonshine, white lightnin, bad idea) the fruits of their hunt to regular customers in a netherworld that you have to see to believe, some of these places are so isolated they are accessible only by river; no electricity, no phone, no plumbing. The boys have been on their own since their father shot himself when the youngest brother was 12. He was despairing his wife's death in childbirth and the stillborn baby. So he buried them in the backyard. There is no law here.The boys live in a ragged cabin deep in the woods; have never gone to school; can't read or write; don't bathe; eat with their hands; have no social skills; never go to town. What they understand is the instinctual. This is Deliverance, second generation. This is the sort of thing that makes the hair on my neck stand at attention. You know what creeps me out? These people have to introduce new blood every so often and so what woman do they kidnap for their nefarious purposes? Eew.OK, anyway, the Gateses seem to be successfully skirting the edge of the cliff until the day they murder a game warden who caught them with a telephone rig in the bottom of their boat and tried to arrest them. Then they fell off the cliff. A few days later the body of the game warden is found. The sheriff calls the state wildlife commission to report the death and talks to a legendary warden by the name of Frank David, who is ascribed supernatural powers, happens to have been the dead warden's teacher and mentor. When the Gates brothers start showing up dead one by one, the sheriff knows Warden David's handiwork but cannot build a case, prove anything or even find him. An old shopkeeper named Kirxy had known their father and has spent years trying to help the brothers. He tried to house them, feed them, send them to school, to no avail. He had to finally return them to their cabin because his wife was as freaked out as I am, see? So when Kent, the oldest brother, and Neil, the middle brother, are murdered Kirxy tries to protect Dan, the youngest. We are given a few hints in the story that it may yet be possible to save Dan. Maybe.So please read this book. It will not appeal to everyone but I'd like to encourage you to venture out of your comfort zone. I love the short story form but I didn't know that until I ventured.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flannery O'Connor once said, "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." This is nowhere more true than here in Alabama author Franklin's short story collection. I am, of course, a northern reader even if I am physically in the south and I want to call these stories both grotesque and realistic. Normally I am not a fan of short stories at all but when this book was pressed upon me with the assurance that it was fantastic, I could hardly turn such potential down. And while I am still not particularly fond of short stories in general, this was indeed a collection that challenged my assumptions about the form and left me satisfied without needing more for completion.The stories are all interconnected in that they all take place in the same part of the Alabama countryside and backwoods and have a few overlapping characters. Franklin's introduction to his stories is impressive and sets the tone for everything that follows. His characters range from the eponymous poachers to a deadbeat alcoholic to a bookie and one of his marks to a drinken, neglectful husband and on and on. Each of the stories has a violence simmering close to the surface and eventually breaking through, devastating all in its wake. Franklin's characters aren't paricularly likable, living on the edge and over the bounds of society, choosing that which will bring about their own downfall. But at the same time, as a reader it is hard to look away from carnage so skillfully rendered. It's hard to say I enjoyed this collection but in some warped sense, I did just that. Franklin is a worthy addition to the pantheon of Southern Gothic writers, not to those who write of the charming, eccentrics here in the South-land but to those who drag up and expose the underbelly of morality and do so realistically and without flinching.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Man but I loved this book of short stories! I never imagined southern Alabama could be so dark and deadly but there are many things I haven't imagined... yet. I might have to go back to Mobile and visit the place.Like the blurbs spew out all over the cover of this book... Raymond Carver's in the south... a world created by Cormac McCarthy... imagination of Faulkner... yeah, I could see all of that. And I would add a bit of Stephen King's creepiness to the mix.The book's namesake is the longest short story and probably one of my favorites. Reading it made me feel all humid and I think moss started growing on me. I know I had mud and muck stuck to my shoes. And getting bit in the neck by a water moccasin really does suck.Interestingly I read a few reviews over at the Amazon site and the people who didn't like it didn't like it because of the cruelty portrayed to animals... um... what about the cruelty to the humans? What about the title 'Poachers'? Wasn't that sort of a clue as to what might be in the book?One of the best southern pieces of literature I've read in a long time. It's not about mint juleps, and sisterly love, or making green fried tomatoes. It's about fighting to stay alive and staying alive to fight. It's the south I remember. It really is there.