If you’re looking for an uplifting escape from the harsh cruelties of life, don’t read anything from Michael Farris Smith. Blackwood, the title itself cold and bleak, is the latest example of his evocative storytelling ... startling, brutal and eerie as events spiral out of control for both the boy and Colburn ... Smith weaves the pair’s stories together in a hauntingly memorable fashion ... Blackwood places Smith firmly among the masters of Southern gothic literature.
Farris Smith isn’t frightened to go dark — and go dark early ... If you’re a fan of Southern or Rural Noir — James Lee Burke, Daniel Woodrell, Donald Ray Pollock, the literary children of Flannery O’Connor — you’ll feel uncomfortably at home ... Blackwood has a creeping menace to it that grabs you from the beginning and doesn’t let up ... I enjoyed Blackwood so much that I picked up Farris Smith’s last two novels ... Though Farris Smith has five novels under his belt, he is little known in Britain. That ought to change: let some Mississippian mayhem, murder and misery into your lives.
... a Southern gothic novel that will ever alter your view of kudzu vines as merely a pesky form of vegetation, but as a metaphor for the past’s malevolent intrusion into the present ... a novel that will haunt one long after the last page is turned. Like Faulkner’s, Smith’s descriptive narrative is poetic, and like Faulkner, his story is heavily weighted by past acts that consciously or unconsciously motivate the characters ... dark ... Southern gothic novels such as Blackwood are not for the fainthearted, but for those who love symbolism, metaphor, and complex characters filled with angst and tortured self-reflection. Give it five stars out of five.
Once you begin Blackwood, it will be difficult to stop. The book will haunt, echo, whisper and scream in the corners of your mind and memory for days after you have finished it --- so much so that it will drown out almost everything else ... [Smith's] most fully realized work to date --- a dark, grim and very real tale ... You will not just want to read Blackwood. You will want to keep it and hold it close, to revisit it again and again. For all of its woebegone passages and subtle plot misdirection, Smith writes with a dark and frightening beauty that is so addictive once beheld that nothing less will do. Read this book, then carve out some time to become familiar with his backlist. A master is in our midst.
As in the best noir, a soul-strangling inevitability hangs over Red Bluff, yet somehow Smith gives his doomed characters a dignity in the face of forces well beyond their control.
... a solid page turner, written in smooth prose. It includes staples of Southern noir, such as a good ol’ boy sheriff, a psychic reader, a gaunt teen lurking at night, lots of beer drinking and folks gone missing ... There’s also, of course, all that sinister kudzu.
Unsettling, heartbreaking, and frequently astonishing, this Southern gothic never runs out of revelations. No mere metaphor in Smith's hands, the novel's ever present kudzu vines are a malevolent force, 'strands of bondage' with the power to disappear people, cars, and entire houses, concealing ghostly caves and tunnels once dug by slaves. Such is the power of Smith's pitch-black poetic vision that the deeper you get into the book, the more entwined you are by its creeping effects ... A gleaming, dark masterpiece by one of Southern fiction's leading voices.
