The Fighter

'Exceptional' — Crime Review on The Fighter

A crooked nose. Scar slices across his forehead. Jack Boucher, he whispered and he shook his head. You ain't nothing but a broken down dirty dog.

Le Boucher, he said to himself in the rearview mirror. The butcher.

Jack Boucher, a washed-up bare-knuckle fighter, is battling against decades of drug and alcohol abuse when he returns home to find his world in ruins.

Set against the desolate backdrop of the Mississippi Delta, the foster mother who saved Jack as a child now rests in a hospice.

Her mind eroded by dementia, the family legacy she entrusted to Jack is now owned by banks and strangers.

And Jack's own mind is failing.

Following a lifetime of fighting, concussion after concussion has forced him to carry around a notebook of names warning him who can be trusted and who should be considered a foe.

In a single twisted night, after losing the money that would have cleared his debt with the queen of Delta vice, Jack's life is quickly derailed.

Forced into the fighting pit one last time, the stakes are nothing less than life or death. "Jack the Jaw" faces his biggest challenge yet as he must once again fight for his life and everything that was taken from him.

A brilliant, gripping novel of endurance and redemption, The Fighter is set to be a major film in 2023 titled Rumble in the Dark starring actors Bella Thorne and Aaron Eckhart.

Praise for Michael Farris Smith:

'Equal parts brutal and beautiful and harrowing' — Chris Whitaker

'As violent as it is poetic' — James Sallis

'Powerful and lingering' – New York Journal of Books

'Smith...excels in this dark and violent Southern grit-lit thriller.' — The Library Journal

'Crisply written tale of thwarted lives and rawboned courage' — Booklist



Michael Farris Smith is the award-winning author of Salvage This World, NICK, Blackwood, The Fighter, Desperation Road, Rivers, and The Hands of Strangers. His novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, NPR, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Book Riot and numerous other outlets, and have been named Indie Next, Barnes & Noble Discover, and Amazon Best of the Month selections. He has also written the feature-film adaptations of his novels Desperation Road and The Fighter, titled for the screen as Rumble Through the Dark. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters.



'Like living language, literary modes have both a formal and a demotic form. What we call noir is high tragedy brought down to the forgotten and disavowed... With The Fighter, cleaving to tradition, Michael Farris Smith brings that tradition brilliantly into the present.'



'Smith's narrative manages to stay just ahead of disintegration, and does so with style, lush prose, and storytelling assurance... The Fighter is a triumph. It confirms Smith's status as one of our foremost authors in the Rough South, Grit Lit tradition established by Crews, Larry Brown, Tom Franklin, William Gay and the towering Cormac McCarthy'



'This resourceful writer weds violence, despair, and glimmers of hope during a few tense days in the life of a once-legendary bare-knuckle fighter... A gifted storyteller who parses battered dreams and the legacies of abandonment with a harsh realism that is both saddening and engaging'



'Equal parts brutal and beautiful and harrowing, it's left me totally bereft'



'Smith's fiction is full of hard people in tough situations, but his obvious love of language and innately rhythmic prose lift his stories to a higher level'



'Michael Farris Smith is continuing the southern gothic tradition of William Gay and Flannery O'Connor. Drenched in sorrow and written with complex language, The Fighter moves toward a conclusion both surprising and inevitable'



'[Blackwood] Smith is emerging as one of the great chroniclers of America's dispossessed'



'[Blackwood] If you're a fan of Southern or Rural Noir – James Lee Burke, Daniel Woodrell, Donald Ray Pollock, the literary children of Flannery O'Connor – you'll feel uncomfortably at home'



'[Nick] Vividly imagined and suffused with pulsing narrative energy and an assured, atmospheric sense of period setting and speech'