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The Line That Held Us Hardcover – August 14, 2018
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When Darl Moody went hunting after a monster buck he's chased for years, he never expected he'd accidentally shoot a man digging ginseng. Worse yet, he's killed a Brewer, a family notorious for vengeance and violence. With nowhere to turn, Darl calls on the help of the only man he knows will answer, his best friend, Calvin Hooper. But when Dwayne Brewer comes looking for his missing brother and stumbles onto a blood trail leading straight back to Darl and Calvin, a nightmare of revenge rips apart their world. The Line That Held Us is a story of friendship and family, a tale balanced between destruction and redemption, where the only hope is to hold on tight, clenching to those you love. What will you do for the people who mean the most, and what will you grasp to when all that you have is gone? The only certainty in a place so shredded is that no one will get away unscathed.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherG.P. Putnam's Sons
- Publication dateAugust 14, 2018
- Dimensions6.26 x 0.96 x 9.32 inches
- ISBN-100399574220
- ISBN-13978-0399574221
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Editorial Reviews
Review
More Praise for The Line That Held Us
“A suspenseful page-turner, complete with one of the absolutely killer endings that have become one of Joy’s signatures.”—Los Angeles Times
“Exquisitely written, heart-wrenching . . . Joy’s descriptions are lyrical and lingering.”—Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
“David Joy’s novel brought me to my knees. Exquisitely written and heart-wrenching, it reminded me of Faulkner in its dark depiction of family loyalty — that “old fierce pull of blood.” . . . Joy’s descriptions are lyrical and lingering. . . . In the end, the line that holds Joy’s characters may be fraught and frayed, but its pull is fierce.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Joy has proved adept with southern noir in his first two novels, and he nails it again here, in the actions of characters who act as they must, for the sake of family and friendship, given their nature. This is fiction as beautiful and compelling as it is searing.”—Booklist (starred review)
"Poverty, class, violence, addiction, isolation: No one writes about the issues facing rural America as clearly, as fairly, or as well as David Joy. The Line That Held Us plumbs the depths of friendship and family, uncovering truths that are stamped on the page with blistering realism."—Wiley Cash, author of The Last Ballad
Praise for The Weight of This World
“Bleakly beautiful. . . [a] gorgeously written but pitiless novel about a region blessed by nature but reduced to desolation and despair.”—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
“Darkly stunning Appalachian noir.”—Huffington Post
“Scenes unfold at a furious pace, yet contain such rich description that readers will do well to read slowly, savoring Joy's prose. . . . Joy's work perfectly aligns with the author's self-described ‘Appalachian noir’ genre, as a sticky film of desperation and tragedy cloaks everything his characters touch. April, Aiden and Thad are hopelessly conflicted, dripping with history and heartache, yet they cling to unique dreams about what life could look like if they carried a bit less weight of the world upon their shoulders.”—Associated Press
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Darl Moody didn't give a wet sack of shit what the state considered poaching. Way he figured, anybody who'd whittle a rifle season down to two weeks and not allot for a single doe day didn't care whether a man starved to death. Meat in the freezer was meat that didn't have to be bought and paid for, and that came to mean a lot when the work petered off each winter. So even though it was almost two months early, he was going hunting.
The buck Darl'd seen crossing from the Buchanan farm into Coon Coward's woods for the past two years had a rocking chair on his head and a neck thick as a tree trunk. Coon wouldn't let a man set foot on his land on account of the ginseng hidden there, but Coon was out of town. The old man had gone to the flatland to bury his sister and wouldn't be back for a week.
The cove was full of sign: rubs that stripped bark off maples and birch, scrapes all over the ground where button bucks scratched soil with something instinctual telling them to do so but lacking any rhyme or reason. A mature buck knew exactly what he was doing when he ripped at the ground like he was hoeing a line with his hooves, but the young ones ran around wild. They'd scrape all over the place, trying to add to a conversation they were too inexperienced to understand.
Darl locked his stand around a blackjack oak that grew twenty feet high before the first limbs sprung off. He climbed to a strong vantage and surveyed a saddle of land where early autumn cast patches of the mountains gold in afternoon light. An unseasonable cold snap following one of the driest summers the county had ever seen brought on fall a month ahead of schedule. It was the last week of September, but the ridgelines were already bare. Down in the valley, the trees were in full color with reds and oranges afire like embers, the acorns falling like raindrops. The nights were starting to frost and within a few weeks the first few breaths of winter would strip the mountains to their gray bones.
Darl sipped a pint of whiskey he had stashed in the cargo pocket of his camouflage pants, took off his ball cap and slicked the sweat from his forehead back through a widow's peak of thinning hair shaved close. He scratched at the thick beard on his chin and listened closely for any sign of movement, though just like the past two evenings, he'd yet to see or hear a thing but squirrels. Soon as the sun sank behind the western face, the woods dropped into shadow and it wouldn't be long for nightfall. Still, he would stay because there was no telling when that buck might show, and in full dark, he would find his way out by headlamp.
Somewhere up the hillside, a stick cracked beneath a footstep, and that sound came through his body like current. His heart raced and his palms grew sweaty, his eyes wide and white. Dried leaves rustled underfoot, and behind the scraggly limbs of a dead hemlock he could see a slight shift of movement, but from such distance and in such little light, what moved was impossible to discern. Through the riflescope, he spotted something on four legs, something gray-bodied and low to the ground. The 3-9x50mm CenterPoint was useless in low light, but it was all Darl could afford and so that was what he had.
Sighting the scope out as far as it would extend, he played the shot out in his mind. At two hundred yards, the animal filled a little less than a quarter of the sight picture. He rolled the bolt and pulled back only enough to check that a round was chambered, then locked the bolt back and thumbed away the safety.
A boar hog rooted around the hillside for a meal. Each year those pigs moved farther and farther north out of South Carolina, first coming up from Walhalla ten years back and now overrunning farms all across Jackson County. There was open season on hogs statewide due to the damage they caused. A father and son out of Caswell County were hunting private land between Brevard and Toxaway earlier that year when the son spooked a whole passel of hogs out of a laurel thicket, and the father drew down on a seven-hundred-pound boar. That was right over the ridgeline into Transylvania County. That pig weighed 580 pounds gutted, and they took home more than 150 pounds of sausage alone. Do the math on that at the grocery store.
All his life there'd been a thoughtlessness that came on before the kill. It was something hard to explain to anyone else, but that feeling was on him now as he braced the rifle against the trunk of the oak and tried to steady his aim, a mind whittled back to instinct. A tangle of brush obstructed his view, but he knew the Core-Lokt would tear through that just fine. He tried to get the picture to open by sliding his cheek along the buttstock, but the cheap scope offered little play. When the view was wide, he toyed with the power ring to get the picture as clear as possible, nothing ever coming fully into focus as he drew the crosshairs over the front shoulders. He centered on his pulse then. Breathe slowly. Count the breaths. Squeeze between heartbeats. On five, pull the trigger. The sight wavered as he counted down. Three. Two. Squeeze.
The rifle punched against his shoulder and the report hammered back in waves touching everything between here and there and returning in fragments as it bounced around the mountains. He checked downrange and the animal was felled.
"I got him," Darl said. His body tingled and his head was swimming. Adrenaline coursed through him and left him breathless. He was in disbelief. "I fucking got him."
Darl sucked down the last of the whiskey in one slug, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and climbed his way down with his treestand. In less than an hour, the light would be gone. He knew he had to hurry. There'd barely be enough time to field dress the pig and get it out of the woods before dark. Maybe Calvin Hooper would help him dress out the hog. Cal had a nice hoist for dressing deer, and that sure beat the hell out of the makeshift gambreling stick Darl had at the house. Whether you were scraping hair or skinning him out, a pig was a whole lot easier with two sets of hands working than one. Cal wouldn't want anything for the trouble. Never had. As soon as Darl got that pig back to the truck, he'd head to Calvin's. "I fucking got him," he said.
A small branch of water ran at the bottom of the draw, and through a thicket of laurel, the hillside steepened. Darl staggered through the copse of trees and slowly climbed until he was near the ledge where the pig had fallen. He tripped on a fishing line strung between two dogwoods, a pair of tin cans with rocks inside clanking loud in the limbs above him. Darl froze and looked around. As his eyes focused, he saw rusted fishhooks hung eye level from the trees, trotlines meant for poachers, and he brushed them back one by one as if he were clawing his way through spiderwebs. That's when he saw him. Not a pig but a man, flat on his stomach. A brush-patterned shirt was darkened almost black with blood, his pants the same grayish camouflage as his shirt.
Darl stepped closer, knelt by the man's legs, and placed his hand on the man's left calf. His body was warm, but there was no movement, no sound of breath. In absolute shock, Darl crawled forward and saw where the bullet had entered the man's rib cage. He'd been quartered away, the hollowpoint opening as it cut through him and exited behind his right shoulder, blowing the top of his arm ragged. The man's left arm hung by his side, his hand open, palm up, and Darl could see a few shriveled red berries balanced at the tip of his fingers. He realized then that he was kneeling in a thick patch of ginseng, mostly young, two-prong plants, but some much, much older. The man had an open book bag on the ground beside him with a tangle of thick, banded roots stuffed inside, the thin runners off the main ginseng shoots snarled like a muss of hair.
Darl knew the man shouldn't have been there the same as him. This was Coward land, and they were both trespassing; two poachers who shouldn't have been there, but right there they were. There they were, one of them gone from this world, and the other facing it in its enormity. While he crouched there on hands and knees, dumbstruck as a child, his mind washed between astonishment and terror.
The man's face was turned and angled into the ground. His neck was sunburned red and dotted with dark orange freckles, the back of his hair thick and curled, a yellow blond the color of hay. Darl stepped across the body, being careful not to get his boots in the blood around him. The man wore a camouflage hat with hunter orange lining the edge of the bill, the words caney fork general store stitched across the front. The hat was knocked crooked on his head and Darl grabbed the bill to try and turn the man's face out of the dirt.
As soon as he saw the dark purple birthmark covering the right side of the man's face, Darl knew him. Carol Brewer, who everyone called Sissy, lay stone-cold dead on the bracken-laced ground. Darl had known Carol all his miserable life, a half-wit born to a family that Jesus Christ couldn't have saved. Some people believed Carol's daddy, Red, might've been the devil himself. There was a meanness that coursed through him, a meanness that was as close to pure evil as any God-fearing man had ever known. Carol was the runt of the family and, by most accounts, the only one who ever had a chance. Some thought if he'd been able to get out from under the wings of his father and older brother, Dwayne, he might've been all right, but things didn't work out that way, and Carol wound up being as much trouble as the lot of them.
Darl let go of the cap bill and Carol's head came to rest on the ground. His eyes were closed with his mouth slightly opened. A yellow jacket buzzed by Darl's ear and landed on Carol's lips. The wasp started to crawl into his mouth but Darl swatted the bug away, his fingers brushing Carol's face. He stomped the bee where it hovered above the ground, then looked to the west to gauge what light remained. Darl knew it wouldn't be long, though nightfall didn't matter like it had minutes before. His thoughts were wild with what would come, but he knew the darkness was a gift now and he welcomed it. His mind raced as the night slowly closed around him like cupped hands. He had until dawn to dig a grave.
Two
Dwayne Brewer goose-stepped down the beer aisle of the Franklin Walmart wearing a latex chimp mask he'd found on the floor by the Halloween decorations. The mask was hot and his breathing was loud. The inside smelled of cheap molded rubber and he slicked the nylon hair back through his fingers while he chuckled at a woman who sneered.
She wore pastel-colored scrubs and white tennis shoes, her highlighted hair pulled back in a ponytail. Through the eye slits of the mask, he saw a little girl, maybe six years old, with one of her fingers hooked in the corner of her mouth, standing beside the woman. Dwayne scratched under his armpit with one hand and clawed at the back of his head with the other, hopping around bowlegged like a monkey, and the child laughed. He pulled the mask off and tossed it into the open cooler, his skin cold with sweat as he ran his hand over his face and reached for a case of Bud heavy. Tearing a ragged hole in the cardboard, he fished out a beer and cracked the top.
"Have a blessed day," he said with a wide smile, tilting the open can toward the woman and nodding. She eyed him like the fiend he was, her little girl hiding behind her leg, spellbound with curiosity as the giant man before her swallowed half the can in one tremendous gulp.
The thing about Walmart was that even a man like Dwayne Brewer could go unnoticed. People pushed their buggies with dead-eyed stares, everything sliding by in the periphery. Consumerism scaled this large had a way of camouflaging class.
At the end of the aisle, he squeezed past a beefy gal in tiny shorts who had a baby on each hip and three children running circles around her. One of the kids reached out as he made his next lap and knocked an endcap of Cool Ranch Doritos onto the floor. The woman was in the middle of a conversation with someone she knew, an older woman who had a toddler with her finger up her nose riding in the buggy. The beefy gal kept saying over and over, "Lord no this ain't mine," shaking the child on her left hip, "Me and Clyde stopped after this one," shaking the one on her right, "This here's Sara's. You remember Sara, don't you? This is Sara's little girl, Tammy. She's my niece."
Buggies were banging and lights were flashing and cash registers were beeping and kids were wrestling a Halloween blow-up ghost decoration that was meant to stand in a front yard and the sheer madness of it was enough to send any sane person into a seizure, but Dwayne didn't have a care in this world. He strutted right through the middle of the chaos, smiling because it was Friday and he had a wad of cash in his pocket from pawning five stolen chainsaws and a flat-screen TV.
Black teddies and bloodred lingerie were rolled back to $9.87. He finished that first beer standing by the floor rack running satin through his fingers with his eyes closed, daydreaming about the last woman he'd slept with. When he was finished, he crumpled the can in his fist, balanced it in the cup of a beige-colored bra, and opened another.
From where he stood, he could see straight down the shoe aisle where a kid sat on a bench. The boy reminded Dwayne of his brother. Shaggy, strawberry-blond hair covered his ears, and his red skin was dotted with freckles. Aside from a thick pair of Coke-bottle glasses, black military frames, he could've been a spitting image of Sissy at thirteen or fourteen years old. The kid wore a shabby shirt and grass-stained jeans that were muddied at the knees. He was trying on a pair of gray-colored tennis shoes, some off-brand jobs with Velcro straps. Out of nowhere two boys came around the corner and loomed over him. A boy in tight jeans, with hair that sliced at an angle across his eyes, snatched one of the shoes out of the boy's hands, looked it over, shook his head, and crowed.
Product details
- Publisher : G.P. Putnam's Sons; First Edition (August 14, 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0399574220
- ISBN-13 : 978-0399574221
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.26 x 0.96 x 9.32 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #182,608 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #11,072 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #11,427 in American Literature (Books)
- #12,941 in Crime Thrillers (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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David Joy is the author of the Edgar nominated novel Where All Light Tends to Go (Putnam, 2015), as well as the novels The Weight Of This World (Putnam, 2017), The Line That Held Us (Putnam, 2018), and When These Mountains Burn (Putnam, 2020). His memoir, Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman's Journey (Bright Mountain Books, 2011), was a finalist for the Reed Environmental Writing Award and the Ragan Old North State Award for Creative Nonfiction. His latest stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Garden & Gun, and The Bitter Southerner. He is the recipient of an artist fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council. His work is represented by Julia Kenny of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. He lives in Jackson County, North Carolina.
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the narrative gripping and suspenseful. They praise the writing quality as amazing, gorgeous, and talented. The book captures the essence of the region and its people through an intoxicating blend of beauty and pain. Readers appreciate the well-developed characters and accurate depiction of the people's habits and landscape. Overall, they describe the book as a work of art that accurately portrays the people and their surroundings.
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Customers find the narrative compelling and gripping. They describe it as a suspenseful thriller set in Appalachia that reads like a film. The story is described as a good storyteller that writes with a deeper meaning.
"...screenplay while the screenplay, to the extent it is possible, plays out like a novel—with the subtle symbolism, the scathing beauty and naked..." Read more
"...This is a story set in Appalachia following the main characters from an accident to a cover up to revenge and the aftermath...." Read more
"...The principal characters are believable and sympathetic, despite their actions. A twist at the end makes the read that much more absorbing." Read more
"...I did wind up feeling letdown by the ending. The plotting could have used work, and the climax wasn’t terribly effective either from a pulp or..." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's writing style. They find it evocative, with poetic descriptions and characters that live. The story is well-written and easy to read, with spot-on dialect.
"...but this novel marries an eternal truth with plot that is compelling and characters that are not caricatures, no small feat and evidence that Joy..." Read more
"...Joy writes brilliantly, and I was almost ready to proclaim that he has exceeded Rash early in the book, but I was ultimately let down a bit...." Read more
"...The book does present some interesting questions about the presence of God in mans life and how it impacts Dwayne resulting in a most unusual..." Read more
"I puzzled over LIGHT and more so over WEIGHT recognizing great writing ; Joy talked his readers on tour with poetic description (wow) and characters..." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's natural setting and blending of beauty and pain. They find it gripping and well-portrayed, with subtle symbolism and judgement. The book captures the essence of the region and its people, blending the dark and light of mountain life in an intoxicating blend.
"...possible, plays out like a novel—with the subtle symbolism, the scathing beauty and naked judgement...." Read more
"...David Joy's writing is so beautiful, his world is so full of color and texture that you feel like you're trudging through the woods right alongside..." Read more
"...Reads like a film thriller. It's violent and beautiful. Well done" Read more
"...It's an intoxicating blend of the beauty that surrounds everything and the pain of survival here...." Read more
Customers enjoy the well-developed characters and accurate depiction of people, their habits, and landscape. They appreciate the raw, gritty, and intense nature of the book.
"...an eternal truth with plot that is compelling and characters that are not caricatures, no small feat and evidence that Joy is someone to watch." Read more
"...I couldn't get enough of the raw, gritty, manly, intensity of this book...." Read more
"albeit superbly written with very well fleshed out characters...." Read more
"...I am from North Carolina and still reside there; Joy accurately depicts the people, their habits, the landscape and spot on dialect...." Read more
Reviews with images
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Stark Imagery and Taut Prose, Watch David Joy
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2018If you are writing a screenplay, or writing a novel that you want metamorphosed into a screenplay without undue consternation on the part of the screenplay writer, I imagine that issues of plot pacing, dialog and symbolism take greater, or at least qualitatively different, importance than for a garden variety novel. Or maybe not. Take the Cohen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men: devastatingly brutal and true to the eternal bleakness of McCarthy’s prose, and yet the novel does not read like a screenplay while the screenplay, to the extent it is possible, plays out like a novel—with the subtle symbolism, the scathing beauty and naked judgement. The book and the movie are different stories.
Is David Joy’s novel (out this month), The Line That Held Us, written for the screen? His website suggests that he or at least those in charge of managing his online presence and/or promoting his work are certainly open to discussing the possibility. This sounds snarking but is not meant to be: I saw Michael Crichton interviewed at the LA Festival of books in the early-mid 2000’s and when asked about why he thought so many of his books were made into successful movies, he deadpanned: “I just figured out that I was good at writing commercially appealing material.”
Joy’s third novel is set in rural North Carolina amongst folks who might call themselves—if/when whites deploy the pejorative as a badge of honor—rednecks. Family and church and hunting and chaw and pickups and all that. Joy lives there and thus has some first hand knowledge of remote Appalachian communities and feels granted (is granted, I guess) license to wax. I haven’t read anything else he’s written and so don’t know if this is familiar ground. The pictures on his website seem designed to portray Joy as one of the characters in his book. There’s even a picture of him with no shoes on. A truck. A tractor. Tattoos. A—not hipster—beard.
The website’s trying to hard to sell the bona fides of a writer whose prose sells itself, as literature and compelling narrative fiction and, why the hell not, screenplay fodder. Joy knows what Busch heavy is and uses the term without f@#king explaining it. He knows that when you crack a beer and take a quick swig there’s foam on your hand you have to shake off. He knows and relates with simple matter-of-factness—again, not explaining—that when you drop in a plug of Kodiak, some sticks to your fingers. There are some lines in this book so lean that could be lifted right from McCarthy, like, “early morning blushed a stand of poplar yellow with fall,” or “a hard frost bit the beautiful that spring,” or describing a flush of birds from a field as a “rising bruise.” I would have liked more of this throughout, but this novel marries an eternal truth with plot that is compelling and characters that are not caricatures, no small feat and evidence that Joy is someone to watch.
5.0 out of 5 starsIf you are writing a screenplay, or writing a novel that you want metamorphosed into a screenplay without undue consternation on the part of the screenplay writer, I imagine that issues of plot pacing, dialog and symbolism take greater, or at least qualitatively different, importance than for a garden variety novel. Or maybe not. Take the Cohen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men: devastatingly brutal and true to the eternal bleakness of McCarthy’s prose, and yet the novel does not read like a screenplay while the screenplay, to the extent it is possible, plays out like a novel—with the subtle symbolism, the scathing beauty and naked judgement. The book and the movie are different stories.Stark Imagery and Taut Prose, Watch David Joy
Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2018
Is David Joy’s novel (out this month), The Line That Held Us, written for the screen? His website suggests that he or at least those in charge of managing his online presence and/or promoting his work are certainly open to discussing the possibility. This sounds snarking but is not meant to be: I saw Michael Crichton interviewed at the LA Festival of books in the early-mid 2000’s and when asked about why he thought so many of his books were made into successful movies, he deadpanned: “I just figured out that I was good at writing commercially appealing material.”
Joy’s third novel is set in rural North Carolina amongst folks who might call themselves—if/when whites deploy the pejorative as a badge of honor—rednecks. Family and church and hunting and chaw and pickups and all that. Joy lives there and thus has some first hand knowledge of remote Appalachian communities and feels granted (is granted, I guess) license to wax. I haven’t read anything else he’s written and so don’t know if this is familiar ground. The pictures on his website seem designed to portray Joy as one of the characters in his book. There’s even a picture of him with no shoes on. A truck. A tractor. Tattoos. A—not hipster—beard.
The website’s trying to hard to sell the bona fides of a writer whose prose sells itself, as literature and compelling narrative fiction and, why the hell not, screenplay fodder. Joy knows what Busch heavy is and uses the term without f@#king explaining it. He knows that when you crack a beer and take a quick swig there’s foam on your hand you have to shake off. He knows and relates with simple matter-of-factness—again, not explaining—that when you drop in a plug of Kodiak, some sticks to your fingers. There are some lines in this book so lean that could be lifted right from McCarthy, like, “early morning blushed a stand of poplar yellow with fall,” or “a hard frost bit the beautiful that spring,” or describing a flush of birds from a field as a “rising bruise.” I would have liked more of this throughout, but this novel marries an eternal truth with plot that is compelling and characters that are not caricatures, no small feat and evidence that Joy is someone to watch.
Images in this review
- Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2019Like most books, The Line That Held Us is a book about choices. The choice that Darl makes to hunt on private land while the owner is out of town. The choice he makes to shoot at what he thinks is a feral hog. The choice he makes to pull his best friend Calvin into things when he discovers that it was a person, not a hog, he shot. The choices that man’s brother, Dwayne, makes in reaction to his brother’s killing.
David Joy writes in Ron Rash’s territory—The Line That Held Us is set in Jackson County, North Carolina; Rash is a professor at a school in Jackson County—so the comparison is inevitable. Joy writes brilliantly, and I was almost ready to proclaim that he has exceeded Rash early in the book, but I was ultimately let down a bit.
The Line That Held Us is about the grisly consequences of a killing. It is set up in the mountains of North Carolina, where once you get past the second homes and the college kids everybody has known everybody else all their life. But there is a thick line between the likes of Darl and Calvin and the likes of Dwayne Brewer.
That line is a key theme. Dwayne is on one side of the line. And Calvin is on the other.
I have my issues with Dwayne as a villain and an antagonist, ultimately, but he gets one heck of a defining moment, early on:
“‘How old are you, boy?’
He looked at Dwayne funny. ‘Sixteen,’ he said.
Dwayne scrubbed at the back of his head with his knuckles, squinted his eyes like he was weighing a tremendous decision. ‘That’s old enough,’ he said. He pulled a 1911 pistol from the back of his waistline and aimed it square at the boy’s forehead.”
The Line That Held Us is a book right exactly in my wheelhouse. The story even crosses a lot of my old stomping grounds. And, man, Joy can really write. I did wind up feeling letdown by the ending. The plotting could have used work, and the climax wasn’t terribly effective either from a pulp or from a literary perspective.
That hardly detracts from the book though (see my numerical rating below), and I need to pick up another of Joy’s books sooner rather than later.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2018And for the third consecutive time David Joy does not disappoint. His writing gets describes as Appalachian Noir. He truly captures the ways of life in rural poverty stricken Appalachia. Where living off the land is quite often the only way to survive. Live to hunt and hunt to be able to live.
Joy has a way of writing so descriptive to the area this book takes place in. I live in this section of the southern appalachias and his description of the woods, the roads even the family names and the stories that go along with it are so spot on that one would think he had lived it for decades instead of his young 30s.
With that being said, The Line That Held Us is by far an easy read. It is rough, raw, brutally morbid and quite often down right haunting. His descriptions of mortality is just as in depth as his descriptions of the woods and the trails that take you there. There is nothing left to the imagination and the grotesque images come to life like no other author can bring.
Even through all the grit and the rough I could not put the book down and in some sections could not turn the page fast enough to see what happened next. And at the end of the last page it left me with images of all the characters and the events surrounding them and they will remain with me for some time.
The Line That Held Us is in no way a typical Southern tale that somebody just came up with. As painfully horrific and raw as it is, it truthfully shows the love between two brothers, the love between two best friends, the love between a man and the love of his life, the willingness to give their own life so the other may live, and that line that held them all together.
Thank you David Joy for yet another great work.
Top reviews from other countries
- ABSReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 31, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars My second of David Joys books and as good
I love the writing of David Joy, the descriptions, the pacing, the switch between characters to give that 3D feeling to the story.
I don’t discuss stories in reviews I just make recommendations. I say read this.
- Dwayne McIntoshReviewed in Canada on March 16, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Lean and mean
Some people do what they have to get by and then sometimes something goes wrong. Then it becomes secrets, grief, revenge and staying alive.
Great characterizations, and pacing. Tremendous story. If you haven't read David Joy do so, you won't be disappointed.
- Chris 07-21Reviewed in Canada on February 13, 2021
4.0 out of 5 stars Sympathy
Menace: that's what I thought while reading "The Line That Held Us."
And having finished the book, I think I could say that it was subversive and unpredictable. I thought "TLTHU" would be about Darl and Dwayne, but it wasn't.
- W. A. BurtReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 10, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Smouldering revenge saga.
A much slower pace than The Weight Of This World but possesses the same unrelenting pulse of aggression and hostility.
In hindsight this is such a simple story but Joy crafts an atmospheric tale with such skill and gravitas it becomes a complex paradox.
- Kurt Brian IsaksenReviewed in the United Kingdom on August 15, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Southern noir
If you like Woodrell this is for you