Poachers
Tom Franklin writes about hunting and fishing, poachers and drunks, factory workers and poor white trash. These are men who react, often violently, against a dying world whose gravity they can't escape. In polluted swamps and contaminated rivers, in leaky gas stations and smoky industrial plants, the people who inhabit these stories are all poachers. In the title novella (selected for inclusion in both New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best American Mystery Stories, 1999), three half-wild brothers kill anything that crosses them, including a rookie lawman, which brings back into the swamp Alabama's mythic Frank David, a game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river these men haunt. In "Grit," an unlucky plant foreman and his bookie run a phantom night shift in a slag factory, making black market sandblasting grit and heading for a deadly confrontation. And in "The Ballad of Duane Juarez," the destitute, alcoholic narrator lives off the scraps of his brother and his brother's rich wife, sinking to nearly unimaginable depths.