Lindy Burleigh
Country Noir
Daniel Woodrell’s novels set in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri have won him critical acclaim, and the genre he writes in, coined by the author as ‘country noir’, has quite a following in the United States. He is not yet as well known here as his compatriot Cormac McCarthy, but he covers similar territory. His latest novel, Winter’s Bone, is a gritty but delicately rendered portrayal of a remote, inbred hill community, which is at once menacing and mysterious.
The Dollys, two hundred of them, all related and living within a thirty-mile radius of each other, have grubbed a living from the ancient Ozark Mountains for generations, the independent pioneer spirit of their ancestors horribly disfigured by the unforgiving terrain and centuries of poverty and ignorance. They exist outside
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