The Long Home

Denver, CO: MacMurray & Beck, 1999. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very Good/Very good. [6], 257, [1] pages. Signed by the author on the title page. Includes Acknowledgments. Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, The Long Home will bring to bring once again the greatest Southern novelists and will haunt the reader with its sense of solitude, longing, and the deliverance that is always just out of reach. Gay's remarkable debut novel is the story of Nathan Winer, a young and headstrong Tennessee carpenter who lost his father years ago to an evil that was greater and closer at hand than any the boy could imagine--until he learns of it first hand. It is also the story of William Tell Oliver, a solitary old man who watches the growing evil from the dark woods and adds to his own weathered guilt by failing to do anything about it. The Long Home, is also the story of Amber Rose, a beautiful young woman forced to live beneath that evil, who recognizes that Nathan is her first and last chance at escape. William Elbert Gay (October 27, 1941 - February 23, 2012) was an American writer of novels, short stories and essays. n 1999, Gay published his first novel, The Long Home. Gay was recognized and marketed as "the real thing". The novel won the 1999 James A. Michener Memorial Prize and his second novel. Provinces of Night was published in late 2000 and confirmed Gay's knack for storytelling. It formed the basis for the 2010 independent film Bloodworth. In 2002, Gay published a collection of stories, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, and in 2006 Gay's third novel, Twilight was published. With its story of a kinky undertaker who hires a hitman to kill a nosy teenager. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Gay's debut, an ambitious saga of love and retribution set in backwoods Georgia in the 1950s, is by turns quaint and charged--and sometimes both. The novel begins with the 1932 murder of Nathan Winer, an honest and virtuous laborer, by Dallas Hardin, a corrupt small-town tycoon, after Winer demands that Hardin move his illegal whiskey still off Winer's land. Hardin gradually gains control of his community through extortion, bribery and psychological manipulation. When the dead man's son, also Nathan, unwittingly becomes a carpenter for his father's murderer many years afterwards, he finds his life bound with Hardin's as he falls in love with seductive beauty Amber Rose, frequently used by Hardin as an escort for his rich acquaintances. Ancient sage and recluse William Tell Oliver, who witnessed the elder Nathan's death and has the victim's skull to prove it, steps in to rectify old wrongs when Hardin threatens to kill the young Winer to maintain control over Amber Rose. A haze of mystery hangs over the narrative: voices whisper and strange lights shine from deep within swampy forests, testifying to the presence of a force more powerful than any petty human tyrant. Strange characters inhabit Gay's world, too, like a boy who thinks baby pigs come from underground or a traveling salesman who brags about his largesse but lives off of Winer's mother. Gay writes well-crafted prose that unfolds toward necessary (if occasionally unexpected) conclusions. Enhanced by his feeling for country rhythms and a pervasive, biblical sense of justice, Gay's take on the Southern morality tale is skillfully achieved.