It’s 1911 and the townsfolk of Old Texas, Alabama, have had enough. Every Saturday night for a year, E. O. Smonk has been destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men, all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over-and-under rifle. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty, and goitered, an expert with explosives and knives. Smonk hates horses, goats, and the Irish, and it’s high time he was stopped. But capturing old Smonk won’t be easy, and putting him on trial could have shocking and disastrous consequences, considering the terrible secret the citizens of Old Texas are hiding.

---

I liked this book as it made whatever book I picked next so much better by just existing. This book was attrocious. Just no. Alabama all the way. I thought it was a detective story, then something about inbreeding, then more about some weird vampire-women?

At the town clerk’s house she found his widow strewn across her bed, the husband unattended in the next room, his humors puddling on the floor. Evavangeline lay on the bed alongside the woman’s thigh and peeled down her stocking and kissed her behind the knee and tongued the mole that grew there and rubbed her teeth against the skin as the woman shifted and groaned and the girl nibbled and tasted blood and closed her eyes. Her skin buzzing and hot. […] On through the town, house to house, widow to widow, calf to armpit to lower back to thigh, the women dreaming of moist sugarcane you bite and suck.

Maybe it was just the writing style that didn’t do it for me. It’s not just the gore and violence and rape and needless, mindless, murder and a bit of vomit. It’s badly written.

The next day he’d spent in his room. He prayed and slammed his fingers in the drawer of the desk on which he ought to have been writing dialogue for the play he’d been outlining in his logbook. He would try that. He dipped his quill in the inkwell and swirled it around. He brought it up dripping and blotted it. It was hard to write with his fingers throbbing. He made a mental note to slam his other hand next time.

I wish I’d slammed a drawer on my fingers, so I wouldn’t have to hold up this book to read it.