Blackwood

The small town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, but now seems stuck in a black-and-white photograph from days gone by. Unknowing, the town and its people are about to come alive again, awakening to nightmares, as ghostly whispers have begun to fill the night from the kudzu-covered valley that sits on the edge of town.

When a vagabond family appears on the outskirts and twin boys and a woman go missing, disappearing beneath the vines, a man with his own twisted past struggles to untangle the secrets in the midst of the town trauma.

This is a landscape of fear and ghosts, of regret and violence. It is a landscape transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing homes, cars, rivers, and hiding terrible secrets deeper still. Blackwood is the evil in the woods, the wickedness that lurks in all of us.



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.



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. I enjoyed Blackwood so much that I picked up Farris Smith's last two novels. Desperation Road, his gripping 2017 tale of outsiders and revenge in Mississippi, is high-quality, too. Better still is The Fighter (2018), a powerful and touching story about a punch-drunk bareknuckle boxer. Brutality and tenderness fight it out on every page. Though Farris Smith has five novels under his belt, he is little known in Britain. That ought to change: let some Mississippian mayhem, murder and misery into your lives



'Smith is emerging as one of the great chroniclers of America's dispossessed. A haunting and utterly compelling read'



'A menacing taste of Southern Noir. Three strangers enter the small town of Red Blub, Mississippi and things start to get nasty and odd...'



'Michael Farris Smith's outstanding new novel, Blackwood, makes a strong case for Mississippi to be considered the most disturbing state in America, if not the world'



'In Smith's haunting, engrossing latest (after The Fighter), strangers awaken an evil force lurking in a small Southern town...Smith's meditation on the darkness of the human heart offers a moving update to the Southern gothic tradition.'