I noticed that the novel “Inescapable” had won the Best First Chapter Award of the Alabama Writers’ Cooperative contest. So, I read the first chapter. It is two pages long and does get the book off to a good start.
The main character, Buck, an Alabama teenager, is with his stepfather Leon at his mother’s funeral. Guests walked up to the front, “lingered for a long time at the casket, examining the body and looking for marks.” While the preacher is giving out platitudes: “Everything happens for a reason…evil things happen…sometimes we don’t understand,” a jaybird is crashing against the stained-glass window.
We learn that it was Buck who had found his mama’s body, at the creek, in the snow, and almost everybody believed he had killed her. Buck remembers nothing of that event, but, traumatized, he gets and stays drunk and hides out in the local woods.
Henley has organized this novel into 67 short chapters, 2 or 3 pages each. Each is a distinct scene, carried through almost entirely in dialogue. Nearly eliminating exposition is an ambitious, difficult way to proceed, and it does not always work.
“Inescapable” has a complicated, multi-generational plot and a large cast, with considerable uncertainty about who is related by blood to whom, and a lot of grievances from the past are unearthed.
Most of the sleuthing is done, appropriately enough, by the sheriff, Ben Jefferson, who is competent and honest. As an additional complication, Jefferson’s wife died under mysterious circumstances. Evidence and oddities are uncovered: a dog’s skull, a bullet, a scrap of cloth.
And while the sheriff may be honorable, we soon learn that the local judge and the district attorney and some of the local lawyers may not be. A break comes when the sheriff receives a letter in “dainty block letters” on pink stationery that says “I know who killed Eva Bustard.”
Eva Bustard was Judge Dick Morrison’s sister-in-law. Her death has remained unsolved for ten years. The judge and Eva’s first husband were law partners, so he should be interested but accuses the sheriff of spreading gossip and quotes proverbs: “He who spreads slander is a fool.”
This book, like many first novels, tries to cram in too much—and can be ragged and hard to follow. Besides domestic disorder and political ambition, in the local “nature refuge” there are hermits. There are also drug growers and sellers, some of them dangerous, violent men and women, with a prosperous business of trucking weed to Mobile. Young Buck wanders around drunk, hallucinates, sees mysterious female figures in the woods, ghosts, perhaps, or people who have been hiding for years.
“Inescapable” is not an unqualified success but I am curious about what Henley might do next.
