Mississippi Noir

June 13, 2016
Mississippi, as Franklin notes in his introduction, has the most corrupt government, the highest rate of various preventable ills, and the highest poverty rate in the country. In short, the state is a natural backdrop for noir fiction. The 16 stories in this uneven Akashic anthology emerge from a cauldron of sex, race, ignorance, poverty, bigotry, misunderstanding, and sheer misfortune, though few of them take advantage of the possibilities of such a mix. Most tales are variants on the theme of two people having sex and then something bad happening to one or both of them—which is a limited exploration of this fairly complex genre, dealing as it does with the spectrum of human nature’s dark side. Still, readers will enjoy those entries that do stand out for their originality: Mary Miller’s “Uphill,” about a man’s effort to take a picture; Jimmy Cajoleas’s “Lord of Madison County,” which follows a drug deal gone strange; and Andrew Paul’s tale of innocent evil, “Moonface.”

June 1, 2016
The big city has no lock on misery in these 16 portraits of dark doings in the Deep South. Some people's expectations are just plain unrealistic. Like Glen, who wants her boyfriend to stop chucking cinder blocks off the overpass in Jamie Paige's "Boys and Girl Games Like Coupling." Or Erin, who thinks she can get her ex-husband to round up her self-destructive father for transplant surgery in Robert Busby's "Anglers of the Keep." Or Cissy, who hopes her baby's daddy will stop kidnapping the child in Dominiqua Dickey's "God's Gonna Trouble the Water." Or Betsy, who keeps grudges forever in Chris Offutt's "Cheap Suitcase and a New Town." In Mary Miller's "Uphill," the unnamed heroine knows her life won't change but thinks it isn't really her life anyway. Even sadder may be the folks who do try to change their lives, like William Boyle's hero in "Most Things Haven't Worked Out" or the petty drug dealer in Jimmy Cajoleas's "Lord of Madison County." There's the usual crew who suffer for love, like Jada in RaShell R. Smith-Spears's "Losing her Religion" or the eponymous "Oxford Girl" in Megan Abbott's grim, predictable tale. There are misfits like mute Hero in Michael Farris Smith's "Hero" and Yizhak Cohen in Andrew Paul's "Moonface." And every now and again, there's a lucky soul who does manage to triumph over the trouble she gets herself into, like Anna in John M. Floyd's "Pit Stop." On the whole, this latest entry in the long-running Akashic Noir series presents tale after tale of people who can't get out of their own ways.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.