3.5 Stars

”I've looked for love in all the same old places
Found the bottom of a bottle always dry
But when you poured out your heart I didn't waste it
'Cause there's nothing like your love to get me high

“You're as smooth as Tennessee whiskey
You're as sweet as strawberry wine
You're as warm as a glass of brandy
And honey, I stay stoned on your love all the time”
-- Tennessee Whiskey, Chris Stapleton / Songwriters: Linda H Bartholomew / Dean Dillon


”Tucker stood in Ohio and looked across the river at the swollen green land of Kentucky. He’d left in early summer and returned in spring, a winter of war in between. He began crossing the bridge. Wind made it sway and he grabbed a strut. Briefly he recalled seeing a dozen dead enemy strewn about a dynamited bridge near the front, a boundary that changed week to week. If Ohio attacked Kentucky, one bunch of the other would blow this bridge to smithereens. Anyone who fought wouldn’t know the difference between soldiers, the same as North and South Koreans. It was Truman’s war, not Tucker’s, but he’d killed and nearly been killed and watched men tremble with fear and cry like kids. His army pay of four hundred forth dollars was folded tight and distributed about his body in every pocket. The eleven medals he received were at the bottom of his rucksack.”

So this is his welcome home, soldier, with no one to welcome him there, but still he’s just footsteps away. Carrying everything he has on his back and still what his body notices most is the absence of the weight of his rifle, as though he was missing a limb.

He’s just a boy, really, still not even yet eighteen, lying his way into the last almost-year of the Korean War. Still, he’s been to war, and in his eyes, he sees himself with his veteran’s pay, old enough to think about getting himself a wife once he gets settled.

Just glad to be back home, where he could see the sky above the same ground he’d walked since he was a child.

"Clouds blocked the stars, lending an unfathomable depth to the air. The tree line was gone and hilltops blended with the black tapestry of night. It was country dark. He closed his eyes, feeling safe."

He’d set out for home, set on finding gainful employment, and somewhat inadvertently meets a young girl he rescues along the way, and ends up spending a night with her which sets their fate. They marry, since they spent the night together, and to do otherwise in 1954 would, at the very least, set tongues wagging. Along the way, he more or less falls into a job working for a bootlegger, the car he has bought along the way was a runner car, and one thing leads to another.

Tucker and Rhonda’s life was never an easy one, babies came along soon, and then another and another, each one loved, but with Tucker gone on the road so much, and Rhonda left to care for the children, some of which more than your average amount of help every day, Rhonda’s life wasn’t easy.

I really enjoyed this story, loved Tucker and Rhonda, although this story really belongs more to Tucker. I loved the gentle tension, the feeling of really being in this backwoods world of moonshine, surrounded by the woods of Appalachia. A simpler way of life in both time and place, with its own set of rules to live by. A different definition of beauty than the ones we both judge our life by, and are judged by today.

This is a shorter story than most, at 240 pages, but it is filled with heart. I found this to be a little bit on the light side for “country-noir,” a good choice for those who are faint of heart.



Pub Date: 10 April 2018


Many thanks for the ARC provided by Grove Atlantic / Grove Press

I enjoyed reading Country Dark. The sometimes dark, edgy storyline and unique characters made this a great read. I look forward to finding more by this author.

This was a difficult book to read, and it is a difficult book to review. It begins with Tucker, an Army vet, returning home to the hills of Appalachia in 1954. Tucker picks up Rhonda, a hitchhicker, and the next day promptly declares that they should "get married. We spent a night together already." And so they do.

They live up in the holler, and proceed to have babies almost every year. The county social services woman ,Hattie, visits regularly, and becomes more and more concerned about the physical and mental condition of the children.

When Tucker is released from prison after serving five years for a six-month sentence, he's not angry. He just wants justice on the outside, and the way he achieves it is nothing short of mind-boggling.

You'll root for Tucker and Rhonda, you'll cheer him on for his good decisions and forgive him when he makes a mistake, and throughout everything, you'll fall in love with this very simple, but loving, couple.

I read this EARC courtesy of NetGalley and Grove Atlantic pub date 04/10/18

This was really good--sharp, crisp, lean, suspenseful and well written and even thought there were some familiar county noir tropes, I really did not know what to expect. Offut reminds me a lot of Daniel Woodrell--and that is a very good thing. Read it in two sittings--I'm sure you will too.

This novel, the first from Chris Offutt in about twenty years, is sometimes bleak, often dark, and shot through with startling and breathtaking beauty - much like the Kentucky hollers he writes about

What a superb read. I loved everything about this book. Tucker is so real you just want him to succeed, no matter what he has to do to achieve it. His family are the focus of his life but because he is young and poor and lives outside the law, he can't control everything and things go wrong. Once I started it I had to finish. Thanks Grove Atlantic and net.galley.

"Clouds blocked the stars, lending an unfathomable depth to the air. The tree line was gone and hilltops blended with the black tapestry of night. It was country dark. He closed his eyes, feeling safe."

This is a fantastic piece of Southern Gothic: Chris Offutt takes his readers to rural Kentucky to tell a story about family and revenge, crime and punishment, responsibility and love - and as in every book worth your while in this genre, the lines between moral categories start to blur the deeper you dive into the story: "War and prison had taught him that sides didn't really exist, that everyone was eventually caught in the middle of something."

Offutt's protagonist Tucker is nearly eighteen and just came back from the war in Korea, his whole possessions being 400 dollars of army pay. After he saves a young girl named Rhonda from violence, he marries her and they start a family. To support his wife and children, Tucker engages in criminal activities - he and Rhonda have known nothing but poverty, but they are trying very hard to provide for their kids and live a dignified, godly life (we're in the Bible belt, after all). And while this would be hard for every family in their situation, some of their children are born with disabilities - as the state prepares to take these kids away, Tucker takes extreme measures to protect his family, thus setting in motion a whole chain of events.

Offutt creates extremely vivid charcters and knows exactly how to play with the conventions of Southern Gothic - his tale about justice and family is everything Fiona Mozley wanted her Booker-shortlisted novel Elmet to be. While the story clearly takes place in the 50's and 60's, the social issues Offutt tackles are shockingly current and seem to touch neuralgic points in Trump's divided America: The potentially negative role of the state, the unjust prison system and, most importantly, the situation of the rural poor. I really admire how Offutt portrays the thinking and the convictions of the Tucker family, because he makes the reader experience the plight of those that are often looked down upon or even loathed by people who deem themselves progressives.

It is obvious that Offutt knows quite a bit about Kentucky and its people: He was born in Lexington, and all of Offutt's books are set in Kentucky or are about people from Kentucky. This year, he was the recipient of the Kentucky Literary Award (for My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir). It also shows that Offutt teaches not only English, but also Screenwriting at Ole Miss: Many scenes have a cinematic feel, and this book would certainly make a great movie, preferrably directed by the Coen brothers.

So all in all, a really good book that will hopefully find many readers.

There’s actually no reasonable accounting for how much I liked this book, considering that traditionally this sort of thing would interest me about as much as visiting Kentucky’s lesser populated areas, which is to say not that much. Seems like all the credit should be given to the author for creating such a completely engaging account with such compelling and interesting characters. I didn’t want to put this book down and, since it isn’t very long (Offutt is laconic, though not quite to the extent of his protagonist), was able to finish it in one day. What does one even describe this style of literature as…country noir? That isn’t just a pun on the name either. There’s just something genuinely nourish about the narrative and Tucker’s stoic silent manner (countrified as it may be) is right out of the genre classics. And Tucker is a great character, tough, street smart, a devoted family man, a real fighter no matter the odds. The exact sort of a lead a reader would want in fiction, someone to care about. The writing was aces, never read the author before, but he certainly knows what he’s doing, loved the sparse economic narration that skips on nothing of importance. Plenty of details to recreate a bygone era of the middle of the last century, this is a real slice of Americana and a terrific read. Thanks Netgalley.