I said I was going to keep an eye out for more by David Joy, and I did, and ... wow. This is a pretty short (~250 pages) novel, but it packs a punch. It's probably too hillbilly-rural to really be like chewing on a live wire, but it's close. Characters that are human and flawed but mostly (arguably including the main antagonist) doing the best they can given their natures and their situation/s. Sure, the instigating event leads to a situation that arguably could have been made ... better for everyone, but the thing about flawed humans is they make flawed decisions. Did Darl deserve what happened to him? Probably not, but he wasn't the only--or even the most--flawed human in the novel; things ... escalated. ("Things ... escalated" is a thing I want to remember, it seems like a core mantra for at least some of the novels I enjoy most.)
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Ohio by Stephen Markley
This is not a happy novel. I mean, you probably wouldn't expect a novel set in dying-small-town Ohio to be happy, but this novel convey...

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Oh, gawds, this novel starts as a bit of a mess and wraps up like someone who read too much Naturalistic fiction and decided to go with no...
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This is a surprisingly good thrillerish crime novel--there are elements of twisty whodunit mystery at play, and interesting layers of inno...
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A grim novel about crime and corruption, and the past catching up to the present, with more than a little in the subtext about it infiltra...
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