Book Review: Gone Dead
By Michelle Hogmire
As an Appalachian expat currently working at a library in Illinois, I try to provide readers book picks that steer clear of Southern stereotypes. The most obvious suggestion would be encouraging patrons to replace J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy with books like the essay collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, or Steven Stoll’s Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia — or at least explain that Vance’s memoir doesn’t represent the entirety of the region and the people who live there.
Once, a local book club picked Hillbilly Elegy for their selection; I’ll never forget the every day frustration of passing by the copies at work and watching them increase in number, knowing more conservative moralizing misinformation was being spread. The upcoming Ron Howard film was the last straw that led me to cancel my Netflix subscription (plus, the fee hikes, which I can’t afford).
Recently, the bane of my existence has been the popularity of Delia Owens’ grating novel Where the Crawdads Sing. The book was hyped and re-hyped and hyped again, recommended to me by many people as a “lyrical Southern novel.” Instead, the prose is overwritten, and the North Carolina characters are caricatures who speak in hokey, disingenuous dialect (especially if they’re people of color).
So for The Haint’s first book review, I recommend a substitute — The Gone Dead (Ecco, June 2019) by Chanelle Benz.
The debut novel follows main character Billie James as she returns to her father Cliff’s house in her childhood home of Mississippi; Billie inherited the property, but she hasn’t visited the place in thirty years. Why? Well, her dad, a successful black poet and civil rights activist, died under mysterious circumstances when she was only four years old. Also, Billie apparently went missing on the same day Cliff passed away, although she has no memory of this.
Of course, as soon as Billie shows up down South, stuff gets weird. Through awkward — and eventually downright dangerous — interactions with the McGees, a local white family, and with the help of quirky Dr. Melvin Hurley, an academic writing about her father, Billie uncovers the truth about her father’s death and her strange disappearance.
The Gone Dead offers a complex portrayal of Southern race relations from a non-white perspective (Billie is biracial; her mother, also a deceased activist, was a white woman). Benz creates excellent Southern characters and environments — honing-in on the particularities of different accents and emphasizing the way that the past is so presently relevant. Billie and others in the town — former Klansmen, Billie’s overly secretive uncle, etc. — are burdened by the actions of their family and held accountable for past ancestral sins, in a classic Faulknerian way.
I loved the inclusion of Dr. Hurley as a character. In a moment when true crime shows and podcasts are so popular, the strangeness of this academic interacting with the family of the man he’s studying — genuinely helping Billie, while also thinking about how he can write a book and further his own career — felt both timely and realistic. He’s a figure many Southerners will recognize immediately: the outsider, the institutional elite, the reporter sent to cover a story in an impoverished place. Benz portrays Dr. Hurley with just the right amount of nuance; he’s not an enemy, he’s there to help, although his motivations are often misguided and self-focused.
Ironically, Benz the author is an outsider who took the time to give the South its due. According to an interview with Jana Hoops in the Clarion-Ledger (also published here at the Lemuria Bookstore Blog), Benz was born in London and grew up all around the US, including a two-year stint in Mississippi while her husband was obtaining a PhD. When asked to describe her experience living in the South, and how it influenced her novel, Benz said the following:
Being there, I understood this country in a way I never had before. How intimately the ache of our racial past is bound up in the present moment. This is a country founded on, built on slavery, and without a true reckoning of that brutal legacy there can be no true reconciliation. I was also surprised by the people I encountered–their rootedness, deep devotion to family, their sense of gratitude and faith, and of course, the master storytellers.
When I think about the haunted quality of the Delta, I think about voices in the air: the longing of the blues, civil rights era speeches, the voices within and calling across the racial and economic disparity. But most of all I was haunted by the voices that have been omitted, forgotten, or silenced, by the long list of names of civil rights era murders whose families have never had anything approaching justice or acknowledgement, although in many cases they know who did it. For so long those families have suffered under that loss and indignity, while the perpetrators and their families have controlled the narrative.
Exactly. I couldn’t have said it better myself. It’s obvious that Benz cares — that she took the time to listen and honor the stories of oppressed minorities. She’s currently living and teaching in Memphis. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance grew up in Ohio, but he’s now a venture capitalist in California. Delia Owens was raised in Georgia, but her nonfiction books about living in Africa include instances of racism and infantilizing the native population.
All in all, my only real criticism about The Gone Dead would be the pacing: even at the beginning, a bit slow in the latter third, and super rushed at the end. Then again, that could also probably describe the South. Despite that reservation, I’d pick up a copy from your local indie bookstore.
Or your local library.
