There are many fine writers, and once in a while, to one’s embarrassment, a career is being established without your knowing it. Matthew F. Jones is the author of seven novels, three of which have been made into movies. Jones’ work is praised, a LOT, by Ron Rash, David Joy, Michael Farris Smith, Mark Powell and several other important southern writers. Jones has taught writing at UVA, Randolph Macon and Lynchburg College and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
This novel’s title, “A Reckoning Up Black Cat Hollow” certainly seems Southern. Is this another Southern writer I did not know about? No. The “Hollow” in the title is in the Catskill Mountains in New York state, not far from Poughkeepsie, where Jones grew up.
Nevertheless, the novel is as violent as Harry Crews, as stylish as Ace Atkins, and, linguistically, experimental in a modern Faulknerian way. Jones eschews commas, which creates a kind of stream of consciousness effect, sometimes fantastic.
The first scenes are ferocious. Jack Spinks is driving down a dangerous mountain road in the evening when he sees a nearly naked teenage girl beside the road and stops. The girl jumps into his Durango, screaming for him to speed off at once. When he hesitates, she dives onto the gas pedal and they careen off into a gulley and then a freezing creek.
Jack saves the girl from drowning and carries her to shore, leaving in the truck his rifle and a big bundle of marijuana. The unnamed girl raves that she is being chased by monsters, demons, who can hear over distances and can see in the dark and have the faces of beasts. She is clearly insane, hallucinating, out of her mind. But Jack’s mental health is not OK either.
We learn that he was traumatized while serving in Afghanistan, spending all one night trying to save a comrade who had fallen down an abandoned well and that he is tormented with grief over the loss of his wife and young daughter. Jack seems to identify the girl from the hollow with his daughter, Iris, and commits to carrying her, miles, in his arms, to escape the demons.
Yes. The demons are real and Jack will have to fight, to the death, evil in several forms: crooked law enforcement, diamond thieves, and a rotten master of a prostitution ring with numerous kidnapped, drugged, captive girls. This is not a novel for the squeamish—at all. There are deaths by gunshot and by hatchet, people with slit throats and others burned alive.
Jones keeps up a breakneck pace, enhanced by an adherence to the unities: time—this all happens one dark night, place—in one patch of dark forest, and theme—we must not let the terrible things we sometimes go through turn our souls black.
