Tomato Red (1998) - Daniel Woodrell

Written by Daniel Woodrell
Read by Brian Troxell
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Hachette Audio
Release date: January 16, 2013
Duration: 04:48:14

Megan Abbott - Author of introduction, etc.

In the Ozarks, what you are is where you are born. If you’re born in Venus Holler, you’re not much. For Jamalee Merridew, Venus Holler just won’t cut it. Jamalee sees her brother Jason, blessed with drop-dead gorgeous looks and the local object of female obsession, as her ticket out of town. But Jason may just be gay, and in the hills and hollows of the Ozarks that is the most dangerous and courageous thing a man could be.

Enter Sammy Barlach, a loser ex-con passing through a tired nowhere on the way to a fresher nowhere. Jamalee thinks Sammy is just the kind of muscle she and Jason need.

Daniel Woodrell’s books are “an acquired taste”

“”You’re no angel, you know how this stuff comes to happen: Friday is payday and it’s been a gray day sogged by slow ugly rain and you seek company in your gloom….” So begins the bravura first paragraph. As readers of Woodrell’s previous fiction will expect, we are in the Ozarks–in West Table, Mo., to be specific. Sammy Barlach, our narrator, is a case–at the moment, he’s employed in the dog food industry… Sammy meets fellow burglars Jamalee and Jason Meridew–a sister and brother pair from Venus Hollow who break into wealthy houses in order to try on clothes and make believe they are rich. Jamalee, however, plans to make it big by using her brother’s remarkable looks to seduce, and then blackmail, the wives of the rich…. The dialogue and characters are what keeps this awkwardly plotted little number plugging along. Woodrell isn’t interested in Li’l Abner cutouts. These figures are all bluff and sorrow, and Woodrell succeeds in giving their misfit poetry a genuine C&W resonance that lingers beyond the last page.”—Publishers Weekly