SOUTHERN RIPLEY COUNTY, Dennis Clay Smith’s sprawling debut novel, weaves together a hardscrabble chronicle of small-town Americana and true-crime thriller through the intersecting lives of fully rendered characters in the impoverished rural community of Naylor, nestled in the foothills of the Missouri Ozarks.
At the center of the storm is Elwood Paine, owner of Naylor’s sole gas station and grocery store, whose shaky marriage to the perpetually dissatisfied Doris is strained even further when smooth-talking millionaire William D. Sharkrider breezes into town and hires most of the citizenry, including Doris, to renovate his newly acquired property, the old Parker place. But the promise of prosperity Sharkrider represents belies a sinister underworld of insurance fraud, grave-robbing, and worse. When Junebug Jensen, a sensitive young man with dreams of baseball stardom, receives tragic news about his Aunt Lorene, Elwood takes the boy under his wing as a surrogate son. But Junebug unwittingly stumbles upon a string of grisly secrets that place him and his new family in the crosshairs of Sharkrider and his ruthless henchman. Smith sets this woebegone tapestry to the beats of a twisty crime drama that barrels towards a raucous courtroom climax brimming with shocking reveals.
SOUTHERN RIPLEY COUNTY has the heft and feel of a more expansive work, a testament to the scope of Smith’s imagination and storytelling ambition. It’s an uneven but frequently gripping read, buoyed by Smith’s keen observational eye, generous empathy, and mordant wit. “Hell, we got one of the varmints out back of the house,” Elwood quips, referring to the “ornery” goat whose milk Doris “mixes up her face plaster with” in hopes it will “smooth some of that snappin’ turtle outta her.”
What SOUTHERN RIPLEY COUNTY lacks in literary artistry, it mostly makes up for in sheer chutzpah. Smith’s prose can be overly prone to bald exposition and hokey colloquial dialogue (“Whadaya say we go over to Maggie’s diner for lunch? I hear they have really good food”) that lands somewhere between Huckleberry Finn and Hee-Haw. But Smith finds authentic notes of sorrow and grief in passages such as Elwood’s dark night of the soul, drinking himself into a stupor after humiliating himself during an encounter with Doris and June Harper (“He looked around in the dark. Where the hell was, [sic] he? He spotted a faint greenish glow above and to his right…the alarm clock on his nightstand, and he was on the floor”). The novel struggles to find an ideal tonal balance between its competing story modes, with its rustic folksiness often clashing awkwardly with its noirish instincts and earnest spirituality. And its sheer abundance of characters and subplots, while admirable, lends it a chaotic, overstuffed feel.
Despite its rough edges, SOUTHERN RIPLEY COUNTY offers an undeniably fun and compulsively readable riff on William Faulkner by way of Erskine Caldwell. It serves up a thick gumbo of crime and punishment in the Show-Me state that’s perfect for readers with a taste for regional murder mysteries on the trashier end of the literary spectrum.
Dennis Clay Smith’s raucous, overstuffed debut novel SOUTHERN RIPLEY COUNTY offers a gumbo of small-town melodrama and twisty crime thriller sure to satisfy readers with a taste for gleefully overwrought regional potboilers in the tradition of Erskine Caldwell.
~Edward Sung for IndieReader