William Gay

I imagine some of you folks aren’t familiar with that name.  Let’s rectify that.

That Evening Sun is an adaptation of one of Gay’s short stories.  I can’t believe I haven’t heard about it until now.

Here’s an excerpt of Provinces of Night, in my opinion, his best work.  In Provinces and in his first, The Long Home, Gay follows the trail of Cormac McCarthy’s early southern fiction and does something McCarthy had a hard time doing– making it readable.  People sing the praises of Child of God, and some of his other early work, but I have a hard time making heads or tails of it.  Gay is able to carry off the same tone without the labyrinthine prose.  He reads with the relative ease of McCarthy’s more palatable Border Trilogy while staying deep in the Southern Gothic tradition.

Gay is hopefully going to come into some fame shortly.  A movie of Provinces is in post-production and it stars some big enough names to get it off the ground: Val Kilmer, Kris Kristofferson.  He’s also got a new book coming…soon.  It’s been pushed back a time or two.  So, look him up.  Get on the train before he’s popular and one-up your friends.