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    Smonk: A Novel
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    Smonk: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Smonk: A Novel
    Ebook257 pages4 hours

    Smonk: A Novel

    By Tom Franklin

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    It's 1911 and the townsfolk of Old Texas, Alabama, have had enough. Every Saturday night for a year, E. O. Smonk has been destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men, all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over-and-under rifle. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty, and goitered—an expert with explosives and knives—Smonk hates horses, goats, and the Irish, and it's high time he was stopped. But capturing old Smonk won't be easy—and putting him on trial could have shocking and disastrous consequences, considering the terrible secret the citizens of Old Texas are hiding.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061842627
    Unavailable
    Smonk: A Novel
    Author

    Tom Franklin

    Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Tom Franklin teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA programme and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, and their children.

    Read more from Tom Franklin

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    Reviews for Smonk

    3.5/5

    61 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      this is definitely one of the best westerns I've ever read. it's engaging, action packed, and weird! it's like unforgiven meets battle royale
    • 4/5
      It is a testament to pressing matters that I finished this two days ago and truly didn't find the space to put it to wraps. Smonk worried me. Several times I feared I would injure myself laughing. I was also worried that members of an unnamed disease cult would butcher me. Tom Franklin has a sense of pitch which astonishes me. No doubt his craven Christian is named Portis for obvious reasons. I liked that touch.

      Enclosed in the back of the novel was a receipt. I treasure such discoveries. This instance provided a delightful portal. The receipt was from a bookstore in Chicago where I bought this novel nearly five years ago to the day (from today). We were in town to see our friends and that evening we were going to see Manu Chao. The humidity was hellish. I spotted this store, begged apologies and ran within. It is is strange that it took me five years to meet Mr. E.O. Smonk. I am glad that I did.
    • 2/5
      So revolting and violent that it's comical, good dialogue, the character Smonk is memorable. But, as with all of Franklin's books, the writing feels like it wants to be a movie script and there's an emptiness and pointlessness buried beneath the entertainment. Is it all an allegory? It isn't interesting enough to care one way or another.
    • 4/5
      Rating: 3.9* of fiveThe Book Description: It's 1911 and the secluded southwestern Alabama town of Old Texas has been besieged by a scabrous and malevolent character called E. O. Smonk. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty and goitered, Smonk is also an expert with explosives and knives. He abhors horses, goats and the Irish. Every Saturday night for a year he's been riding his mule into Old Texas, destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over and under rifle. At last the desperate citizens of the town, themselves harboring a terrible secret, put Smonk on trial, with disastrous and shocking results. Thus begins the highly anticipated new novel from Tom Franklin, acclaimed author of Hell at the Breech and Poachers.Smonk is also the story of Evavangeline, a fifteen-year-old prostitute quick to pull a trigger or cork. A case of mistaken identity plunges her into the wild sugarcane country between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, land suffering from the worst drought in a hundred years and plagued by rabies. Pursued by a posse of unlikely vigilantes, Evavangeline boats upriver and then wends through the dust and ruined crops, forced along the way to confront her own clouded past. She eventually stumbles upon Old Texas, where she is fated to E. O. Smonk and the townspeople in a way she could never imagine.In turns hilarious, violent, bawdy and terrifying, Smonk creates its own category: It's a southern, not a western, peopled with corrupt judges and assassins, a cuckolded blacksmith, Christian deputies, widows, War veterans, whores, witches, madmen and zombies. By the time the smoke has cleared, the mystery of Smonk will be revealed, the survivors changed forever. My Review: Oh! Oh, I see...THIS is what y'all were on about when y'all were carryin' on over Franklin's writing. It surely to hell couldn't've been that crooked mess. That was painful.Eugene Oregon Smonk is as horrible a character as Ignatius Reilly. He's as gross, as grotesque, as cruel, and as massively hilariously vile. Smonk suffers from gout, so he's already ten yards ahead of everybody else in the book in my good graces. He's got terminal consumption, too. (I don't have that.) He's bowlegged, he hates horses, he detests people. He's murdered and raped and generally been as much like Attila as a modern man can be.Evavangeline is fifteen, a whore, and mean as a butt-fucked polecat. She doesn't know what “thank you” means, she's got no idea what impulse control is, and she expresses her displeasure with johns who don't pay up (I refuse to reach for the cheap joke inherent in “stiff her”) in most-often fatal ways.And these, laddies and gentlewomen, are our heroes.Yeup. This book, it's as much fun to read as a William S. Burroughs novel edited by Roger Corman. It's got energy. It's got no time for sacred, for nice, for sweet. It's got no place for normal, for kindly, for restrained. (Unless you mean “tied up for sex.”) It is, in short, a book for the boisterous and the bawdy, not the timorous and the tidy.I totally get the Franklin thing now. That crookedy crapola? That's nothing much, it's no doubt what happened when some longfaced Puritan somewhere started biting Franklin behind the ear after this book came out. He should slap her into next Sunday and go back to Smonking. This genre-busting carnival of louche and salacious and violent living is far far far more interesting and better written.
    • 5/5
      How to do justice to this weird and wonderful book in a review? It is profane, funny, and engrossing from start to finish. This is a book where life has a very low value, indeed. The author deftly weaves together the story of a teenage prostitute, a con-turned-Bailiff, a Northerner and his so-called Christian Deputies, the Bailiff's son, and of course, the title character, Mr. E.O. Smonk, a really bad guy who may nevertheless have his reasons.The book reads more like a Western than anything else, despite being set in Alabama in 1911. (It is a sort of remote part of Alabama, to be sure.) But I don't think any landscape like the one Franklin presents has ever existed--this book's setting pretty much stands alone, and at the center of the mystery is the town of Old Texas (which is also a real place in Alabama). Franklin maneuvers his cast of characters through this landscape and a series of encounters with each other and various other oddballs and misfits. He almost overdoes it, especially in the book's great revelation--but somehow it all works. If you aren't easily offended by graphic descriptions of just about everything, this is a book you must read.But don't read it if you have anything against glass eyes and their travels.
    • 5/5
      I learned of this book from author Alden Bell when reading an interview with him for my review of his book The Reapers are the Angels. He listed this as one of his favorite books, and I said at that time that after reading the synopsis for Smonk, I could see where he got his inspiration for his character Temple of The Reapers are the Angels.This book is a rip-roaring ride! I had mentioned to my friends early on that this book was the most vile and obscene book I’d ever read, and yet the most entertaining. The author is unapologetic in his approach, seeming to set aside all sensibilities and censor. Brash and unadulterated, this story is totally in your face, almost daring you to be offended.Smonk is portrayed as a pretty despicable character, and is easily disliked from the beginning.Evavangeline, on the other hand, while tough and unforgiving, and a 14-year-old prostitute on the run, is portrayed with a certain vulnerability. I found myself hoping for her redemption.One thing I did have difficulty with was the lack of quotations used in dialogue, initially making it difficult to tell the conversations apart from the narration. But I got used to this pretty quickly, so it didn’t take away from my enjoyment.This is my first book by Tom Franklin, and I look forward to reading more of his work. I think Hell at the Breach may be next on my list.Final word: Pick up this book, sit back with a drink, cover your ears and brace your sensibilities. You’re in for the ride of a lifetime!
    • 2/5
      A real disappointment after reading, "Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter". Smonk just wasn't my kind of book.
    • 1/5
      Tom Franklin's debut story collection Poachers earned him rave reviews from the likes of Philip Roth and Richard Ford, as well as a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. His first novel Hell at the Breech followed in 2003 and was both well received and highly entertaining: a darkly riveting Southern Gothic western that Franklin based on true events that occurred in south Alabama during the 1890s. The book worked exceedingly well on several levels, was finely plotted, wonderfully worded and paced, and promised even better things to come from this obviously talented writer.Then in 2006 came the unfortunate Smonk, or as the title page of Franklin's 3rd book fully endows, Smonk, or Widow Town, Being the Scabrous Adventures of E.O. Smonk & of the Whore Evavangeline, in Clarke County, Alabama, Early in the Last Century.... Besides being a sadly inefficient plot summary, this extended title alerts the reader that he's now squarely in the realm of the "picaresque", a rightfully maligned sub-genre of prose fiction, which Wikipedia defines as "usually satirical and depicting in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society".In Smonk Franklin attempts to adhere to these maxims, but he pushes all his characters and situations so far over-the-top that they seem to exist without any relation to reality, or possess any shred of even latent humanity, with incidents of murder, rape, random savagery, and/or acts of incest swiftly following one another in such casual, and at times, dizzying debauchery that the tone of Franklin's story is effectively shattered: satire's out the window, right along with any breath of honest humor except lame 'gallows' irony, appropriate more for the abatoir or charnel house. So dulling is the repetitive violence and blood porn in Smonk that the reader loses cause with the whole misconceived mess, and wishes that Smonk and his vile company would somehow just quietly go away. But they don't, and long before the preposterous denouement exposing the laughable 'mystery' of Widow Town and of Evavangeline's parentage, this particular reader had lost all interest and longed for the release offered by the last page of this great stinker of a novel.
    • 4/5
      Unlike any other book I can think of, reading "Smonk" is a lot like climbing a mountain. In the beginning, I found it hard to get into (particularly since i found the lack of quotation marks unbelievably irritating) , but the momentum I gathered from the fact that it is a super quick read propelled me halfway through the book before I even had time to process my misgivings. And I am very glad for that because, much like its rabid characters, once the story gets its claws in you it won't let go. One taste of what is underneath the straightforward exterior of the story and you won't stop until you have reached the story's summit.Franklin deftly finds a way to make you root for both sides, both hunter and hunted. The horrifying is laced with intrigue . If I had been told that I was going to be glued to a story that mixes southern literature with an almost old west feel and throws in the supernatural horror I remember associating with R.L. Stein as a child, I would have laughed and never checked "Smonk" out of the library. But somehow the silly, evil, and quaint meld into an intoxicating brew of a story.