A TONIGHT SHOW SUMMER READS FINALIST
An electrifying first novel from “a riveting new voice in American fiction” (George Saunders): A young woman returns to her childhood home in the American South and uncovers secrets about her father’s life and death
Billie James’ inheritance isn’t much: a little money and a shack in the Mississippi Delta. The house once belonged to her father, a renowned … in the Mississippi Delta. The house once belonged to her father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old. Though Billie was there when the accident happened, she has no memory of that day—and she hasn’t been back to the South since.
Thirty years later, Billie returns but her father’s home is unnervingly secluded: her only neighbors are the McGees, the family whose history has been entangled with hers since the days of slavery. As Billie encounters the locals, she hears a strange rumor: that she herself went missing on the day her father died. As the mystery intensifies, she finds out that this forgotten piece of her past could put her in danger.
Inventive, gritty, and openhearted, The Gone Dead is an astonishing debut novel about race, justice, and memory that lays bare the long-concealed wounds of a family and a country.
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This is a mesmerizing novel. There are certainly some flaws in the plot, the main arc of which revolves around a woman trying to discover the truth behind her father’s death, and one point of view falls completely flat. However, I gulped this book down because of the stunning language, emotional punch, and a Mississippi Delta setting you won’t soon forget. Take a look at this description, for instance: “In the dirt between asphalt and field, she steps over mangled bits of plastic, a few beer bottles, and an old tin of dip. The first house she passes has a dog chained to a tree and the next has bits of torn furniture that have failed to dissolve on the lawn. Squirrels hop and slink through its clotted trash. A woman is standing barefoot next to a boy and little girl on the porch. When they see her, they huddle back, the woman hiding in the doorway as the boy grabs the little girl by the hand.”
It’s not easy, describing a scene in such a visceral way, but Benz does it over and over again in this book, with muscular, original prose and a dark humor that makes this book hopeful rather than bleak.
“The Gone Dead” is an excellent tale about the differences in experiences between generations and races in a small rural town in the Mississippi Delta. Billie inherits her childhood house and returns to live in it from New York City where she lived with her dying mother. Her curiosity compels her to learn more about the death of her father, whom she barely remembers as a young child in the 1960s. Blacks and Whites live in close proximity on seemingly friendly terms, but none of the people who were around at the time of her father’s death want to talk about the circumstances. But Billie keeps digging to find the truth.
Wise and assured, Chanelle Benz’s The Gone Dead plunges the reader into a fraught and complicated homecoming of sorts, the South you return to after a life away, a place you never really knew… Benz’s prose is insightful and surprising, chock-full of beautiful sentences that demand re-reading.
I loved this brilliant mystery from Chanelle Benz.
Chanelle Benz’s prose is remarkable for its acute intelligence, flawless precision, and startling beauty. This wry, soulful novel reads like a thriller but an intimate one; it becomes both a genuine page turner and a deep character study.
The southern novel will never be the same after this book. Billie James, the protagonist of The Gone Dead, holds more mystery, lyricism, tragedy, nuance than most characters I’ve read in recent years…. Writers were not supposed to be able to do what Benz does in The Gone Dead.
I love this novel for many reasons, its fresh look at the hardscrabble Mississippi Delta, its varied voices that form a chorus around its main voice, Billie, and the mystery at its heart…. [The Gone Dead] feels as old and rich as the delta soil on which it happens.
Chanelle Benz has the power and grace to make the quiet stunning and the explosive beautiful. The Gone Dead is a wonderous exploration of pain and confrontation of its sources.