Reynolds is a forty-something liquor-store owner on Clear Creek Lake,
near Cottonwood, in East Texas. Once he was a banker, but the real
estate scandals of the '80s taught him he had trusted the wrong people
and brought him within a hair of an indictment. Once he had a wife and
twin sons, but she left after the scandal, taking the boys to her daddy's
ranch in West Texas. Now Reynolds owns Lake Country Liquor Store
and lives in a trailer behind the store, with several women passing through
his life for intermittent periods. He's satisfied—but a little issatisfied.
Reynolds also has a weird family from whom he's mostly estranged.
His mother, Edwina, is a bible beater, fond of giving sermonettes to
Reynolds, her oldest son who has strayed from the church and lived in sin
with women. His brother, Perry, is a survivalist with a stash of AK47s
and other automatic weapons that he sells illegally from time to time.
Perry also teaches government at the local high school, but his job is in
peril because he's been teaching his own anti-government views. And
Perry has a dark secret hidden in his past. Ray Reynolds, Sr., is a retired
Ford truck dealer who's bent on inventing a perpetual motion machine and
leaves his wife to live as a hermit at the lake and focus on his invention.
The palpable tension between the brothers makes this in part a
Cain-and-Abel story. Perry has always been the good son, but Reynolds
learns more than he almost wants to know about his brother. And though
they fight—at least once physically—they remain brothers, with the
distance between them balanced by their sense of family loyalty.
There is laughter in these pages in wry, witty dialogue and raw
self-honesty, and there is suspense in Perry's late-night gun deals, which
he conducts on the boat ramp by Reynolds's store, without Reynolds's
knowledge. But there's also a real sense of people with frailties and
weaknesses and dreams and hopes, for themselves and for their family.
Donley Watt captures small-town East Texas, its attitudes and habits
and language, with a masterful sense of place. His rednecks are as real
as his Dallas lady and his Austin vegetarian.
Reynolds and his family draw you into their story until you can't leave
and you'll find yourself turning pages rapidly at the end, desperate to
know what happens to them. And whether Reynolds will ever truly be
happy with his life.
_________________________________________________________
DONLEY WATT has lived in Texas most of his life. He is the author of
three books—Can You Get There from Here—a collection of short stories
that won the Steven F. Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters
for the best first work of fiction in 1994; the novella The Journey of
Hector Rabinal, and two novellas titled Haley, Texas 1959. He and his
wife, Lynn, an artist, live in San Antonio.
What people are saying about this book
"It's rare these days to find a character in fiction who seems at once as
unique and particularized as flesh-and-blood and richly resonant in the
best of literary ways. Reynolds is such a character. Donley Watt's new
novel is a terrific tour de force."—Robert Olen Butler
