Complete orr of William Gay books Publitn Orr and Chronologil Orr.
Contents:
WILLIAM GAY, 1943-2012
* william gay novelist *
AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTWilliam Gay Di at 70; Wrer Tied to TennseeFeb. 29, 2012William Gay, a self-tght novelist om ral Tennsee who emerged om obscury his late 50s wh crilly praised books the Southern Gothic style, died last Thursday at his home, a log b Hohenwald, southwt of Nashville. Gay’s most recent publisher, MacAdam/Cage.The son of a sharecropper who spent much of his workg life blue-llar jobs, Mr.
Gay wrote about stic Tennsee wh an si observer’s eye for lol lor and a hyperbolist’s light regnal idsyncrasi. Gay created a hometown for his fiercely eccentric, furly motivated or morally challenged characters — Ackerman’s Field, Tenn. Gay wrote “The Paperhanger,” a short story about a man who killed a ltle girl bee she had looked at him funny.
Gay’s prose, not exactly purple, was often ght wh mythic ronance — that serpent, for example — which sued the amb parabl of good and evil that drew him. Gay to the readg world beyond lerary journals, he created a battle between Dallas Hard, a malevolent bootlegger, and Nathan Wer, the young rpenter Hard hir to build a honky-tonk on the property he has taken over om s crippled owner. Gay’s imagatn,” Richard Bernste wrote The New York Tim Book Review about “Provc of Night,” “giv this book s nsirable narrative power but also mak far-fetched, termtently zany, somethg about four-fifths Flkner wh ‘The Omen’ fillg the rt.”And the brazenly nightmarish “Twilight” (2006) a mortician’s grisly secret — he fil the rps he buri pecially mabre fashn — is disvered by a pair of teenagers who are set upon by a psychopathic h man the mortician hir to dispatch them.“ ‘Twilight’ is almost textbook Southern Gothic, wh s elements of the grotque and perverse, s psychologil extrem and s fixatns on vlence and sex,” The Washgton Post’s reviewer, Art Taylor, said.