A Single Shot

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A Single Shot Pub. Date: 9/19/2011 Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

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Single Shot Pub. Date: 9/28/2011 Publisher: Mulholland
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A Single Shot (1st ed) Pub. Date: 4/28/1996 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Overview

After the loss of his family farm, John Moon is a desperate man. A master hunter, his ability to poach game in-season or out is the only thing that stands between him and the soup kitchen line. Until Moon trespasses on the wrong land, hears a rustle in the brush, and fires a single fateful shot.

Following the bloody trail, he comes upon a shocking scene: an illegal, deep woods campground filled with drugs, bundles of cash and the body of a dead young woman, killed by Moon's stray bullet.

Faced with an ultimate dilemma, Moon has to make a choice: does he take the money and ignore his responsibility for the girl's death? Or confess?

But before he has a chance to decide, Moon finds himself on the run, pursued by those who think the money is theirs. Men who don't care about right and wrong and who want only one thing from John Moon: his body, face down in a ditch.

Matthew F. Jones' A Single Shot is a rare, visionary thriller reminiscent of the work of Tom Franklin, Ron Rash, Daniel Woodrell, and Cormac McCarthy.

Editorial Reviews

Los Angeles Times

"A terrific novel....you can hardly breathe while you're reading this book....his crisis evokes every palm-sweating, heart-stopping, seemingly undoable mistake you've ever made."

People

"A backwoods drama that is part Crime and Punishment, part Deliverance, and all white-knuckled suspense....it packs a helluva punch."

More Reviews (5) Fewer Reviews

The New York Times

"A harrowing literary thriller....a powerful blend of love and violence, of the grotesque and the tender."

The Washington Post

"Jones owns a fine writer's eye for the kind of details that matter."

Publishers Weekly

In a starred review, PW called this story of accidental death in the Blue Ridge Mountains a "gritty, claustrophobic blend of Jim Thompson and James Dickey." (May)

Library Journal

Abandoned by his wife and young son, John Moon sits in his trailer on the mountainside, feeling abused by the world. All he has left is an acre-and-a-half of the family farm, and he makes do with odd jobs and poaching game off state land. One morning he goes hunting a deer out of season and winds up killing a young runaway instead. In trying to hide the evidence of his accidental crime, Moon finds a huge sum of money, plus evidence that the young girl was not alone. Will Moon's crime be discovered? What will be the consequences for him and his family? The action in the novel takes place in the span of just seven days, and Moon's inevitable mental deterioration in the face of his horrible crime lends force to the narrative. Jones (The Elements of Hitting, LJ 3/1/94) has fashioned a compelling and readable story of one man's struggle with enormous guilt and his inability to make things go right in a world determined to make him fail. The mood is bleak, and the ending poetically just. This is not a comfortable novel to read, but it is a powerful one that deserves a wide readership. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.-Dean James, Houston Acad. of Medicine/Texas Medical Ctr. Lib.

Kirkus Reviews

Backwoods blood and gore from the author whose previous expeditions into the grotesque (The Cooter Farm, 1991; The Elements of Hitting, 1994) have shown just how far we can go down Tobacco Road.

John Moon is the sort of country boy who makes his living by killing things in the forest. Unhappily divorced from a wife who looks upon him as no-account trash, he sets out at the beginning of the story to patch things up by poaching a deer for her, but he accidentally shoots a young girl instead. This is his first mistake, and even John can see that it's a big one. "He thinks of the hundreds of animals he has shot, gutted, and cut into strips of meat. . . . Blood is blood, he thinks, wiping the girl's on his pants. And dead is dead." What to do? Well, of course the police are out of the question, so John very sensibly locks the girl's corpse in his freezer along with his venison steaks and tries to go on as before. Unfortunately, however, the girl had a very mean boyfriend who deals drugs and just happens to be an old prison friend of one of John's neighbors. John's attorney, Daggard Pitt, suspects that something is up, but John can't quite bring himself to trust the lawyer (he used to work for the bank that foreclosed on his parents' farm), and he manages to dig himself a very deep hole in short order. There's a climactic bloodbath, and along the way we're treated to a fair amount of sleazy hillbilly sex, but this is nevertheless a story aiming to be about moral regeneration, written in the most tragic Faulknerian mode. The tragedy here, though, seems merely to degrade with an even hand, and it's not at all clear at the end that anyone has truly been saved.

Powerfully written but ultimately empty.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780316196703
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Publication date: 9/19/2011
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 392,500
Product dimensions: 5.40 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Matthew F. Jones is also the author of the critically acclaimed novels Boot Tracks, Deepwater, The Elements of Hitting, Blind Pursuit and The Cooter Farm, as well as a number of screenplays, including adaptations of A Single Shot and Boot Tracks, both which are being filmed in 2011. Deepwater was made into a film in 2005. He grew up in rural upstate New York and lives now in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Anonymous

Posted May 3, 2012

This is as good as noir gets. A Dark, powerful, thriller with a

This is as good as noir gets. A Dark, powerful, thriller with a story you won't be able to get out of your mind. John Moon - the novel's flawed but upright antihero - makes a split-second miscalculation that ends a girl's life and unleashes all manner of hell on his life - some self-inflicted and some inflicted by some of the most terrifying and believable bad guys you'll encounter in the literary world. A story both edge of your seat thrilling and poignant at the same time.
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