Book Review
Fiction
“At the End of the Road”
By Grant Jerkins
Berkley Prime Crime, 320 pages, $15
Book launch party
7:15 p.m. Tuesday, free. Decatur Library Auditorium, 215 Sycamore St., Decatur. 404-370-8450, Ext. 2225; www.georgiacenterforthebook.org.
By Gina Webb
Nostalgia and serial killers — the two just don’t sound compatible, do they? But in his second book, Atlanta author Grant Jerkins successfully grafts a bogeyman of skin-crawling proportions onto a poignant coming-of-age story set in the rural Georgia of his youth.
It’s not the first time Jerkins’ childhood has inspired his fiction. In his debut novel, “A Very Simple Crime” (2010), a memory of getting lost in a dark house one night evolved into a tale of family secrets and murder that reviewers called “an extremely nasty study in abnormal psychology, ” a novel whose author seemed “determined to peer into the darkness.”
If possible, the darkness settles even more deeply in “At the End of the Road, ” where a car …
Continue reading ‘At the End of the Road’ By Grant Jerkins »
A little more than halfway through Blake Butler’s new book, he reveals a sure-fire cure for insomnia, courtesy of the great director, Alfred Hitchcock, who shared it during an episode of his classic TV series. “‘It comes in capsule form, ‘ Hitchcock says, arranging a row of five bullets nose-up on his desk. ‘”For best results, they must be taken internally.’”
It’s a Sunday afternoon and New Orleans writer Tom Piazza has stopped at a flea market and is hunting through boxes of what he calls “shellac” — 78s from the late 1920s and early ’30s, the kind of records prized by collectors, each containing about three minutes’ worth of song on each side. Blues singers. Jazz bands. Old-timey string bands.
