Midway through Tom Franklin’s novel, Smonk, a hunter proclaims, “Ever white man of my generation’s been shot. If they ain’t ye can’t trust em.” Thanks in part to Smonk—a murderous, lecherous, quick-drawing brute—most of the men in this story can be trusted; they have their bullet hole to prove it.
A book so steeped in blood lust and just plain old lust, seems to leave little room for further vices. But a young boy uncovers even greater wickedness when he exposes the title character for what he really is: “Mr. E.O. Smonk ain’t no normal fellow. He’s of the devil.” Undoubtedly, the boy’s judgment is sound. And most likely, Smonk would feel quite tickled by the compliment.
Mr. Eugene Oregon Smonk is a man who eats onions likes apples. Hairy-fingered, goiter-laden, he doesn’t think twice of loping off a dead man’s penis and shoving the flesh down the corpse’s throat. He’s a man of hacking coughs, clammy bodies, and his insides consist solely of blood, vomit, grit, guts and vim. He is a man heavily armed and knowledgeable in the ways of explosives; a man in need of his own theme song. A fitting refrain: “Smonk’s the roughest, and toughest, and cruelest brute in all the land!”
Because, frankly, he really is.
Taking us back to the lawlessness of southern Alabama in the early 1900s, Tom Franklin eloquently writes of the hollows and the quiet quakes of the country and land he knows well. And as he leads us down the trail of two parallel stories—the murderous Smonk and the whoring Evavangeline—we run into an entire region crowded with bandits and killers and corrupted youth.
If you haven’t already guessed it, beyond the prose itself, there is little loveliness to be garnered from the tale. While sentences such as, “He noted there were men on the porches, downstair or up, and slid the rifle from its sock and snickered the safety off,” truly reveals the intimacy of his language, but when pressed alongside glass eyes, stray dogs, rabies and machine guns, the effect is startling—a transcendent prose attacked by a violent subject matter. The result is a form somewhat undiscovered: something that can only be classified as a southern, comedic horror.
The reader continually alternates between cringes and giggles, trembling equally out of both fear and hysterics. In short order, we become enchanted under Franklin’s spell, jaded by the carnage and, for some reason beyond our understanding, chuckling as well, as if the gore is the punch line to the joke.
Franklin’s ability to invoke such opposite reactions in his readers is, perhaps, the most mysterious accomplishment of all. We know better than to smile as Smonk picks off innocent men with his Winchester, yet the tight-lipped rendering affords us our fun. It turns twisted voyeurs out of all of us.
The book conjures images of Hell, and we can’t help but be reminded of the inscription Dante discovered upon entering through those very gates: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
When delving into the world of Smonk, perhaps we should do the same. The world Franklin gives us, thankfully, is not our own.
But it’s one we love to inhabit.