Poachers

A brilliant debut collection of stories set in the American Deep South, by a distinctive and award-winning new voice. Poachers reads as if Raymond Carver were still alive and living in the profoundly Deep South. Or imagine a world created by Cormac McCarthy and plunk it down in the woods of southern Alabama, where emotions run as raw as moonshine. In ten spare, muscular stories, Tom Franklin evokes a world of forests and swamps, hunting and fishing, and fills it with poachers, drunks and poor white trash.

He creates haunting tales about people who react, often violently, against a dying world whose gravity they can't escape, people like the three half-wild brothers in the award-winning title story, who treat the swamp as their kingdom and hunt down anything that crosses their path -- until they themselves become the prey.