FIND YOUR OWN WAY HOME

The search for a missing girl gives blighted lives hope for redemption in this haunting verse novel.

George’s story centers on the romance between Bad Boy—a ne’er-do-well who robs pharmacies and joyrides around the town of Hollow Rock, Tennessee—and his 15-year-old girlfriend Alison, whose grandmother has threatened to shoot him. After a season of furtive, passionate trysts, Alison dumps him for a local meth-head, which leads to violence and to Bad Boy taking Alison against her will across the Mississippi to West Memphis, Arkansas; she finally escapes him at the Flying J truck stop and is last seen jumping into the cab of a random trucker who drives off with her. The novel then shifts to the perspective of “the Chaplain,” an ex-con who stages Christian revival meetings in a tent backed by a band featuring Debbie, a former sex worker, on drums. The Chaplain’s sermons stress that no one is too sinful and low to be forgiven and saved by Jesus, a proposition that’s challenged by a sinister trucker who announces his own unforgiveable sin: killing a girl. The Chaplain and his band fall in with a female trucker who witnessed the Flying J incident, retrieved the pink sneaker Alison left on the tarmac, and has been putting up missing-persons posters with Alison’s picture wherever she goes; at one of the Chaplain’s meetings, the sinister trucker comes onto her radar as a likely suspect in Alison’s disappearance. The stories of Ruth, the trucker’s sister who recalls his disturbing childhood behavior, and the West Memphis police detective who shrugs off Alison’s disappearance but gets pulled in deeper, are also braided into the narrative.

The story unfolds in a perfectly rendered, hardscrabble South seen through the eyes of working-class people with industrial-strength vehicles navigating an archipelago of strip malls and truck plazas connected by roaring interstates and shadowy county roads. George writes in a poetic meter as supple as the most naturalistic prose; the writing is grounded in plain, earthy English but has a musicality that makes it feel like a biblical parable or a hillbilly highwayman’s ballad. (“A dustball cheapskate town and Broad / Street much the way is just two lanes, / which goes to show you what broad counts / for here—and Hollow Rock is Nowhere / Tennessee, but, like they say, / it’s home.”) The author writes about tawdry lives riddled with bad decisions, but finds a lyrical beauty in them. (“A girl like Alison you don’t / find at the Carroll County Fair. / She’s like a light you see at night / too low on the horizon and / you think you see an airplane crashing—you listen for the sound and hear / none, turn on the TV and there’s / no news, and then you wonder what / you saw and did you even see it?— / something bright and terrible, / the beauty hurts your eyes, you only / wish you’d see it once again.”) Readers will be captivated by George’s dark, hallucinatory vision and gorgeous language.

This gripping, kaleidoscopic crime novel has a gritty tone infused with plangent emotion.