“Lay Your Armor Down” is Smith’s eighth novel, and two of the previous novels have already been made into films. Raised in Southern Mississippi, Smith is the son of a Baptist preacher. After graduating from Missississipi State he moved to Europe for three years. Of course this was an enriching experience; he learned French. But perhaps most strikingly he saw people in cafes and on trains reading, which he had not seen a lot of back home.
He returned, took a PhD in creative writing at Southern Mississippi and began writing the books. One of his novels is “Nick,” a fascinating prequel of a sort to “The Great Gatsby,” which imagines the story of Nick Carraway, fighting in the trenches in France in WWI before ever meeting Gatsby on Long Island. The other seven are set more or less in the southern third of Mississippi in the present and the near future, and a bleak future it is.
Hurricanes like Katrina are coming with more frequency and ferocity. As opposed to Eliot’s “Wasteland,” where there is sterility through drought, the land is sodden. Crops fail; many farmers have given up, left. The population is down. Times are desperate and there is a breakdown of law and order. In “Desperation Road,” a deputy sherif attempts rape. In “Salvage This World,” a major livelihood is collecting scrap.
There is a Darwinian feel. Those who remain are poor, often violent, struggling to survive even at the expense of their fellow sufferers. Vicious wolves roam about. In addition to the physical violence—shooting, assault, arson—there seems to have developed a kind of spiritual warfare. In “Armor,” Keal and Burdean, two thugs for hire, have accepted a job, essentially blindly. They are to go to an abandoned rural church and bring what they find there to their boss, whom they have never met.
On their way they are met in the woods by a very old lady with dementia, or so it seems. Keal had, in a dream, foreseen this. At the church, they find several dead bodies and a little girl, who may be some kind of saint or angel, perhaps with powers to save others, so she should be saved, but there are dark forces out to kill her. A young woman, Cara, wears a cross that can be used as a weapon. Cara also has flashes of premonition. In an irrational world, these gifts are crucial.
Smith suggests a kind of Romanticism here. Burdean, the older thug, is reluctant but finally succumbs to evil, even though harming the girl is clearly a kind of sin. Keal, younger and therefore less corrupted, balks. And everyone is terrified of Wayman, a mysterious master criminal and embodiment of evil who seems to me to be a kind of Satan figure, evil walking the earth, mysterious and powerful.
