Product Description

It is the summer of 1958 in Dewmont, Texas, a town the great American postwar boom passed by. The kids listen to rockabilly on the radio and waste their weekends at the Dairy Queen. And an undetected menace simmers under the heat that clings to the skin like molasses. . . For thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchell, the end of innocence comes with his discovery of the mysterious long-ago demise of two very different young women. In his quest to unravel the truth about their tragic fates, Stanley finds a protector in Buster Lighthorse Smith, a black, retired Indian-reservation cop and a sage on the finer points of Sherlock Holmes, the blues, and life's faded dreams. But not every buried thing stays dead. And on one terrifying night of rushing creek water and thundering rain, an arcane, murderous force will rise from the past to threaten the Stanley and everything he holds dear. Vintage Lansdale, A FINE DARK LINE brims with exquisite suspense, powerful characterizations, and the vibrant evocation of a lost time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #109325 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

NEW BOOKS
'The reader leaves this book not only having experiences a good read and a satisfying ending, but also with a real understanding of a time and place in US history and the timelessness of serious issues fluently argued throughout the novel. This is an excellent book'

Review
'The reader leaves this book not only having experiences a good read and a satisfying ending, but also with a real understanding of a time and place in US history and the timelessness of serious issues fluently argued throughout the novel. This is an excellent book' (NEW BOOKS )

'Evocative coming-of-age novel' (Christina Koning THE TIMES )

NEW STATESMAN
"Part detective story, part horror chiller and part Huck Finn adventure yarn... vividly captures the atmosphere of an isolated, backwards little town."

Customer Reviews

Not Hap and Leonard, but still a fine novel.
I have to admit to being a huge fan of the Hap and Leonard series by Joe Lansdale but this book certainly won't disappoint his readers.
Although it's your usual "adolescent rite of passage" novel it has much to say about race relations in the US in the 1950s and the scenes of Stanley's family life range from the poignant to the downright hilarious.
To be honest I found the plot less interesting than the characters and their relationships with each other but when writing is as fine and expressive as this I really don't care.
It would make a great film!

Not very dark really
Not to be confused with Tami Hoag's "A Thin Dark Line" (hey, I'm going to write a book called 'Moby Tick'), Lansdale's ponderous semi-thriller has us hanging around lethargically, just as if we were in the Texan summer weather he describes, waiting for all the threads to come together. They do, but by then one has gone off for a siesta on the porch.

The Dewdrop Drive-In Movie Theatre
Stanley Mitchel Jr is 13 when his family buy the Dewdrop Drive In Movie Theatre and Concession and move into the house on the premises which has a large painting of cowboys and Indians on the side. It is 1953 and Dewmont in deep-south USA is a thriving community that, in common with most southern towns, has a
black population segregated entirely from the white one. But Stanley is to come to know two of them very well - Rosy Mae the family's new cook and Buster, the Dewdrop's projectionist.

Stories and rumours abound in Dewmont about the Stillwind family and the death of their youngest daughter, Jewel, and when Stanley finds the remnants of their burned down home and a metal box full of letters, he decides to try and find out what really happened. Stanley is about to grow up very quickly as confusions pile up and the story thickens and stirs itself into something much more dark and sinister than at first appeared. The thin dark line of the title is the border between the world of the living and the dead, and Stanley finds himself embroiled in a mystery which spans that line more than once.

Stanley's voice is captivatingly naïve and innocent, but as the mysteries are uncovered he learns things that bring him up against the living world, and that of the dead, in ways that test his understanding to the limit.

This reminded me of Carson McCullers' modern classic The Member of the Wedding as Stanley's coming of age plays out against the background of casual racial bigotry and the struggle of small-town America to break with the old order and fit the new version of modernity. There are some infelicities along the way, however and the dumb-cluck flatness of the summary of future events given at the end of the novel could have been avoided by closing the novel with the previous section. However, up until that point, A Fine Dark Line is an engrossing and enjoyable read.