A Review of Taylor Brown’s “Gods of Howl Mountain”
Hillbilly Moonshiners
There’s a lot going on with Taylor Brown’s third novel, Gods of Howl Mountain, that it’s hard to believe that it runs less than 300 pages. Set in the early 1950s in the mountain country of western North Carolina, the book is about moonshiners. The main protagonist, though claiming there’s just one may be a stretch, is a man named Rory Docherty, who is a Korean War veteran with the amputated leg to prove it, who runs bootleg whiskey for the local kingpin from the top of Howl Mountain to the whorehouses and roadhouses in the valley below that was artificially dammed in the 1930s. He’s in love with the daughter of a preacher who uses rattlesnakes in his services, and he’s also run afoul of a local stock car racer. Add into this mix a bevy of corrupt policemen and revenue agents from the FBI who aren’t afraid to use guns, and that’s not to speak of the fact that one of the other main characters is Rory’s grandmother, who is a bit of witch with her potions and lotions, and you’ve got a fair bit to chew on.
However, that’s not even mentioning what the real impetus of the plot is. It turns out that Rory’s mother has been institutionalized because she lost the will to speak, and took the eye of a man who killed her boyfriend — Rory’s father — during the murder. Finding out what really happened to Rory’s mother is the backbone of the book, something that Gods of Howl Mountain returns to at will and then makes you forget about not long after it’s brought up. In that sense, this is a novel about being haunted by the past and the secrets that the past keeps. That said, the big secret of the book that’s revealed in the end pages is more of a “how did that secret actually be kept?” There’s no real reason for the identity of Rory’s father’s killer being kept for decades, not within the power structure of the mountain’s denizens itself.
Still, for all of its flaws and overreaches, Gods of Howl Mountain is a thrilling read. This is literary fiction of a Southern Gothic bent to be sure, but it comes with — by novel’s end — non-stop action and bloodletting. Bad guys get their comeuppances, and good guys get what they deserve. However, even when the good guys are getting their reward, it comes with a price — more or less. Thus, this book keeps you guessing. Part of the reason is that there are so many plot threads to resolve and major characters to either kill off or elevate. In a way, this book is kind of like a hillbilly version of The Godfather, though not nearly as epic. Because of its relatively brief length, it can actually be hard to follow at times because so much is stuffed into the gills of these pages. There’s one character named Eustache who plays a major role in the background — he’s the whiskey supplier — but even though I’m pretty sure it comes up early in the book how he’s related to all of the main characters, I wasn’t sure who he was related to because I’d forgotten as I read this book incrementally. You really need to be on your toes and have a good memory for details for much of this novel to make sense.
The other book that Gods of Howl Mountain reminds me of is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Not in subject matter, really, but more of in tone. Both books are highly poetic and elevate language to new levels (does that surprise you for a book about Southern hillbillies?). In fact, Gods of Howl Mountain kind of steps out of bounds with its subject matter in terms of how the book is written. The richly nuanced language is kind of wasted on its backward characters, but it could be also argued that Brown is romanticizing the locale of the novel and its characters. The time period may also be something that’s being romanticized as well — an era when all you had to do to get some action was to take a highway down to the edge of a lake where it simply disappeared into the water, and hole up in one of the buildings of these nearly lost villages.
What did I think of this novel? Well, I did feel that some of it was clichéd. After all, the character of Rory’s grandmother Maybelline was a little too almost-Wiccan for my liking, she who keeps Mason jars in trees to catch tree spirits and has all sort of natural homeopathic remedies to cure everything from erectile dysfunction to snakebites. That said, I liked the theme of the novel, that this is what masculinity run amok looks like with all of its contraband subterfuge action and gory violence. In fact, it plays like two novels in one — one that’s richly nuanced and full of heft, and one that is strictly dime-store pulp fiction.
Overall, though, Gods of Howl Mountain is strictly an average book. Despite all of the fireworks of the last quarter or so, there are lulls and dull stretches in some of the rest of the pages. Characters are introduced briefly only to set up a change to the mountain economy in the epilogue — and that’s something that’s only teased at, so, again, readers will have to be alert and draw their own conclusions to the text. Still, Rory is a likable enough character — one with his share of demons, but one who is cunning and is a source of strength. The bad guys are similarly oily and you’ll be rooting for their comeuppances when they get them. All in all, if one is seeking a novel that quite ably written and has the odd gun blazin’ here and there, you could do worse than give Gods of Howl Mountain a try. It’s an interesting book that’s not always successful, but, at it’s best, is an entertaining yarn about them good ol’ boys. If that reference makes you nostalgic for certain bad TV of the early ’80s, well, this is sort of the literary equivalent of that but is a steady diet of lead and muzzle flash. This is a book you can go to town with. Even if that town’s halfway to being flooded with water.
Taylor Brown’s Gods of Howl Mountain was published in trade paperback by Picador USA on February 19, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com.
