This post is part of a series in which I describe the twenty-four books I read in 2017 for Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge.
Task: Read a book that is set within 100 miles of your location.
Ugh. This book. Here we go.
So, Donald Harington is the Arkansas novelist (but props to Charles Portis) – not only is he himself an Arkansan, but his Stay More series is set in a fictional Ozark town called Stay More (Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks is the best known of the set), just south of Jasper in Newton County and easily within 100 miles of my house here in Fayetteville. His work positively drips Arkansas, and while he isn’t the best known novelist in the world, he’s definitely the name to bring up if you want to appear cultured and with-it in this particular state.
I’d read Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks a long time ago, and was happy enough to return to Stay More for Lightning Bug, the first of the Stay More cycle.
Lightning Bug has a number of commendable qualities. It plays with perspective, tense, and format to get at a hallucinatory dream state where multiple accounts of events play out simultaneously, contradicting each other without being contradictory. It’s also raunchy as anything, sometimes hilariously so (“Some people keep a lot of cats because they like cats, but Latha kept cats because she liked to watch them fuck. I know this for a fact.”) and sometimes awfully off-puttingly so (a virgin is colloquially defined as “a five year old who can outrun her daddy and her brothers”).