Blurb

“A fresh, authentic, and eloquent new voice in American fiction.” – Robert Morgan, New York Times bestselling author of Gap Creek

In Gods of Howl Mountain, award-winning author Taylor Brown explores a world of folk healers, whiskey-runners, and dark family secrets in the high country of 1950s North Carolina.

Bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood – a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. Slowed by a wooden leg and haunted by memories of the Korean War, Rory runs bootleg whiskey for a powerful mountain clan in a retro-fitted ’40 Ford coupe. Between deliveries to roadhouses, brothels, and private clients, he lives with his formidable grandmother, evades federal agents, and stokes the wrath of a rival runner.

In the mill town at the foot of the mountains – a hotbed of violence, moonshine, and the burgeoning sport of stock-car racing – Rory is bewitched by the mysterious daughter of a snake-handling preacher. His grandmother, Maybelline “Granny May” Docherty, opposes this match for her own reasons, believing that “some things are best left buried.” A folk healer whose powers are rumored to rival those of a wood witch, she concocts potions and cures for the people of the mountains while harboring an explosive secret about Rory’s mother – the truth behind her long confinement in a mental hospital, during which time she has not spoken one word. When Rory’s life is threatened, Granny must decide whether to reveal what she knows…or protect her only grandson from the past.

With gritty and atmospheric prose, Taylor Brown brings to life a perilous mountain and the family who rules it.

Review

This one is the literary version of Sad Songs Make Me Happy. Gods of Howl Mountain is set in a world where you ride along with the story believing at no point there is a happy ending waiting for you at the end. While the mystery of “who killed Rory’s father” is always on the horizon in this book, it is not the mystery that drives the story. It is the haunting, of a plethora of pasts, that drive’s Rory’s story. I’m a fan of Appalachian noir, and this book sits in that wheelhouse. Dime store pulp action with a tinge of nuance. Rory battles the dark and desperate, never once making you feel like the world has any light to it, but enduring said world is a virtue unto itself. For what is life if it is not enduring?