The Eldest daughter of a meth cook has to search for her father, now missing for days, when a bondsman comes calling. Seems her dad got out of jail by borrowing money and hasn’t been seen since, and the problem with that is, if he doesn’t show up in court quite soon, well the whole family will lose their house and land. And they’re already living hand to mouth.

What a short and punchy piece of writing. I loved it.

Southern lit from America has its hooks in me. The poetic musicality and honest eye feels like a fantastic continuation to McCarthy. This didn’t feel particularly gothic to me. It’s grounded in realistic and verisimilitude, but the loss of agency stems from institutional America and her fathers decisions, themselves driven by kin and poverty.

This certainly has the voice of southern gothic, though. The prose are gorgeous and definitely reminiscent of poetry when we get descriptive writing. It’s musicality and verbiage drips with a style that conveys time and place and atmosphere. But sometimes it actually is flowery, concerned with the musicality to the point where the prose feel lost, rather than the intentional grounding they do when they strike the right chord. I lean heavily toward descriptive writing but not at the expense of what the sentence is trying to convey to the reader. It happens just enough that I found my eyes overdriving the text and had to go back and re read.

Everything else about this worked. The characters, the dialogue, the story, and the setting are all top notch and dripping with personality. I will 100% be reading more from this author.