Books like Yonder Stands Your Orphan

While full of lovely moments of freaky Dixie-fried beauty, there are only so many acid-tinged musings on God and trips to the local fishing hole a body can take! This final novel from Mississippi's avenging angel of word-drunk verbosity focuses on a gaggle of aging eccentrics who try to move past the disappointments of life by fishing and building a ramshackle barge. Unfortunately, a local pimp and car thief with Conway-Twitty hair is seriously losing his shit and has taken up the hobby of harassing locals with an arsenal of obscure knives. This Southern Gothic set-up allows Hannah to mosey around in his wild variety of characters' skulls, pontificating on their guilts, their lonlinesses, and their mad and passionate desires. But road beers and outlaw country can only sustain a rambling, baggy narrative for so many pages. A loose metaphor about moral decay and a strange orphanage for children serves as bookends for all the outlandishness packed within this grungy yarn, but it all comes off as murky as a swamp or a person’s rationalization for religious faith. Nonetheless, it ain’t every day you read a book with a haunted saxophone player, a junkie biker turned tattooed evangelist, a sheriff with thespian leanings, a septuagenarian MILF, a misanthrope named Pepper, masochistic camp counselors, a pornographer named Large Lloyd, a car trunk full of skeletons and an evil spirit with the perfect hair.