Against the Country

Against the Country is a gift for fans of Southern Gothic and metafiction alike. Set in the Virginia pines, and overrun with failed parents, racist sex offenders, cast-off priests, and suicidal chickens, this novel challenges literary convention even as it attacks our national myth—that the rural naturally engenders good, while the urban breeds an inevitable sin.

In a voice that evokes the old-timer’s winding yarn, Metcalf’s narrator leads the reader through Goochland County—a land of stubborn soil, voracious insects, and lackluster farms and forests—until it becomes clear that Goochland is not the setting. It is the living, breathing menace that warps each and every character’s existence.

Equal parts fiery criticism and icy farce, Against the Country is the most hilarious sermon one is likely to hear on the subject of our native soil, and the starkest celebration of the language our land produced. The result is a literary tour de force that raises the question: Was there ever a narrator, in all our literature, so precise, so far-reaching, so eloquently misanthropic, as the one encountered here?

Advance praise for Against the Country

“Like a lot of people, I’ve been waiting to read this book for about a decade, so in saying it doesn’t disappoint I mean to say a lot. The humor in it produces at times a strange grimacing laughter, as if the thing you’re laughing at is so awful your brain can’t believe your face is doing it and struggles to pull the muscles into composure. It’s sad in places—the sadness often seems to lie in the very precision of the jewel-work sentences, as if the two were bound up together. To find anything reminiscent of the writing you’d need to go back about 150 years, though it sounds new in Metcalf’s handling and occasionally even punk. What he has to say about American childhood is frightening and true. Virginia, you have been both honored and shamed by your wayward son.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead: Essays