Twisted Tree [NOOK Book]

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Overview

Praise for Twisted Tree


"Twisted Tree makes me think of Winesburg, and the fine line between plain folks and grotesques—how one day, through the quirks of circumstance, we find ourselves on the other side of that line, and wonder how long we've been there. Like Russell Banks in The Sweet Hereafter, Kent Meyers spins out his intimate life stories from the hub of a small-town tragedy and takes us into places we never thought we'd go."

--Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing


"Twisted Tree is a piercing and original book, beautifully written and conceived. In it Kent Meyers has ...

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Overview

Praise for Twisted Tree


"Twisted Tree makes me think of Winesburg, and the fine line between plain folks and grotesques—how one day, through the quirks of circumstance, we find ourselves on the other side of that line, and wonder how long we've been there. Like Russell Banks in The Sweet Hereafter, Kent Meyers spins out his intimate life stories from the hub of a small-town tragedy and takes us into places we never thought we'd go."

--Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing


"Twisted Tree is a piercing and original book, beautifully written and conceived. In it Kent Meyers has created a lyrical atlas, revealing all that lies beneath his indelible world of freeway towns and bison ranches--a haunted territory of regret, longing and guilt."

-- Jess Walter, author of Citizen Vince


"A master wordsmith and storyteller, Kent Meyers brings us characters who, like so many of us, take years, a lifetime even to face their histories, lying to each other and themselves along the way. I don't come across novels like this very often -- gorgeously written, addictively entertaining, suspenseful, and spirit-full." -- Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer

 

"In the riveting pages of Twisted Tree, Kent Meyers has expanded the map of his imaginative territory to produce his own brand of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County on the stark Midwestern plains. Present and past collide, exposing the delicate mix of history and dream that shapes the American landscape." -- Judith Kitchen, author of The House on Eccles Road


"Twisted Tree brings all of the dynamics of rural America to life with vivid prose and true to life characters. Kent Meyers is writing some of the most groundbreaking novels about the West today." --Russell Rowland, author of In Open Spaces

Editorial Reviews

Don Waters
Meyers creates a stunning narrative…quilting together an intricate patchwork from confessions, remembrances and secrets. Each chapter, a completely self-contained account, deepens our understanding of other community members while touching upon the mysterious circumstances of Hayjay's disappearance. What's most wonderful is Meyers's casting. There's not one flat, uninteresting character in the bunch.
—The New York Times
From The Critics
In his beautiful and unsettling new novel, Meyers (The Work of Wolves) examines the effects of a murder on the residents of a small South Dakota town. In an opening sequence that is so disturbing it's difficult to read, teen Hayley Jo Zimmerman is stalked and abducted by a serial killer. The rest of the novel uses the rippling consequences of Hayley Jo's murder to explore the smaller rural tragedies in Twisted Tree, S.D.: Elise, a forlorn grocery clerk, judges everyone by their purchases and hides the secret terrors of her past as a missionary; Sophie Lawrence cares for her invalid stepfather while losing her sanity; Angela Morrison learns to accept the harsh realities of being a rancher's wife; Stanley, Haley Jo's father, channels his grief into a desperate need to connect with a stranger. The novel is brimming with arresting descriptions, and the western setting is employed to surprising effect, as in a sequence contrasting the removal of an invasive salt cedar bush with a father's awareness of his son's first crush. Meyers's small masterpiece deserves comparison to the work of Raymond Carver, Joy Williams and Peter Matthiessen. (Sept.)
The Barnes & Noble Review
Kent Meyers achieved regional celebrity with The Witness of Combines (1998), a collection of essays about growing up in the rural Midwest. With his novel The Work of Wolves (2004), set in South Dakota, he won some national acclaim. In this novel, Twisted Tree, Meyers returns to depict South Dakotans in and around the tiny fictional town of the same name. The novel revolves around Hayley Jo Zimmerman, a teenage girl kidnapped by the I-90 Killer. Despite this sensationalistic newspaper-like epithet, Twisted Tree is hardly a thriller. Rather it is a sociological portrait, brilliant at times, of the killer, the residents of Twisted Tree, a Colorado truck driver, and others who have encountered Hayley Jo. Told from several points of view, the story structure is reminiscent of the multiple viewpoints in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, often revealing character through stream of consciousness.

The kidnapper, Alexander Stouton, is a fat, demonic psychopath. Elise, the middle-aged grocery checker, who at 16 was a lay missionary in South America, tells us something of Hayley Jo. "She had an air of reverence and distance. I saw myself when I was her age -- that sense of martyrdom and purity, of watching others' needs." We meet the town's eclectic collection: Sophie, who has returned, after a ten-year absence, to help her mother after her mother's husband has a stroke; Eddie Little Feather, a comical drunk, eventually run over by a truck; the grieving Zimmerman parents; Hayley's friend Laura; a maniac poacher who is never caught in the act; and a sinful former priest. These characters share a commonality of voice and action with those in Annie Proulx's trilogy of Wyoming Stories. But the creations in this gripping novel transcend Proulx's often absurd caricatures, as Meyers writes with a Faulknerian sympathy for his characters that is frequently nonexistent in Proulx. Meyers's westerners would not be out of place in Yoknapatawpha County. --Joseph Peschel

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780547400808
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Publication date: 9/24/2009
  • Sold by: Barnes & Noble
  • Format: eBook
  • Pages: 304
  • Sales rank: 243,215
  • File size: 217 KB
  • Items ship to U.S, APO/FPO and U.S. Protectorate addresses.

Meet the Author

Kent Meyers

KENT MEYERS is the author of The RiverWarren, The Light in the Crossing, and Witness of Combines. He lives in Spearfish, South Dakota, where he teaches at Black Hills State University.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating 3.5
( 12 )

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 21, 2010

    I Also Recommend:

    Kent Meyers does not fail

    I bought this book because the cover got me when I was browzing. The anguished horse at the wire made me want to read the book without knowing anything about it.

    It did not fail. This book was fascinating -- I disocvered the events in the rear mirror, through the ruminations of characters about the events, while also revealing their complicated lives in this Dakota town, with its distances, yearnings for the bright lights, and acceptance of the inevitable, with humor the only protection.

    The book held me and I had to stay up all night reading it. Then I read Work of Wolves, an earlier Meyers book, and thought it wonderful. Now I have to find Combine somewhere (not available through B&N).

    Anyway, if you like Jim Harrison, you will like Kent Meyers. They have the same long view.

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