Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Praise for
Yonder Stands Your Orphan:

“A tour de force of dark humor . . . all wrought in the kind of eloquently twisted prose for which this Southern Gothic master brooks no peer.”

—
Elle

“Barry Hannah is the Big Daddy of Southern letters, the mendacity-battling Colossus. . . . You have to wonder about Mississippi: Faulkner and Wright, Welty and Morris, and now Hannah, whose prose at once shines and burns like a piney woods fire. They do say Delta soil is the best in the South—maybe it grows our language, too.”

—Diane Roberts,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Hannah possesses a rare linguistic inventiveness that seems to expand the story form, the same sort of manic talent that Bob Dylan shows for writing songs. . . . Hannah pits his Flannery O'Connor-inspired villain against two Walker Percy-inspired heroes, always teetering on the edge of doubt. . . . There are passages in his novel that rival the beauty of thematically similar books such as
A River Runs Through It
or even
Moby-Dick
.”

—Brad Vice,
San Francisco Chronicle

“Hannah . . . etches brilliant, surreal sketches of Eagle Lake like Balthus would a painting. . . . The best of his phrases can send you in opposite directions, make your ears warm.”

—Scott W. Hellman,
The Boston Globe

“An electrifying prose style, memorable characters, plot lines laced with violence and absurdity, and humor as black as an Ace comb . . . An expert navigator of the back roads of the human heart . . . Hannah could make a dog laugh. . . . To use a boxing analogy, Hannah isn't an author who lumbers straight at you. He's one of those darting little bantamweights, all shuffle and sidestep, bobbing and weaving and delivering blows from all angles. The punches crunch, too. . . . Hannah's sentences are miracles of invention.”

—William Porter,
The Denver Post

“Hannah is an amazing writer: master of the sentence fragment, with a colloquial ease that can rise to unexpected eloquence. Under the Grand Guignol lurk lofty themes: Christianity and the search for modern meaning, man's proper relationship with the animal kingdom, the Old South and the New.”

—Nina King,
The Washington Post Book World

“Hannah's masterpiece, a biblically violent morality play . . . It creeps with the poetry of Blake.”

—Shawn Badgley,
The Austin Chronicle

“Fantastical portraiture of the characters who haunt the bogs and tackle shops of the deep South . . . [with] a sense of eerie reality that a simpler vision of humanity would not . . . If there is anything predictable in this novel, it's Hannah's mastery of the written word . . . [the] thick, rich textures of the sentences and characters they form.”

—Taylor Plimpton,
Men's Journal

“
Yonder Stands Your Orphan
has captivatingly strange characters, arresting ideas about love, lust, faith, and family. . . . In a few deft, unpredictable strokes, Hannah can indelibly etch a character into the imagination, and into the literary landscape.”

—Laura Demanski,
The Baltimore Sun

“Hannah's writing is brilliant, his language luxuriant. . . . If it's Southern Gothic you want, this is as good as it gets.”

—Mary Jane Park,
St. Petersburg Times

“Hallelujah! After a ten-year absence, Hannah is back with a vengeance. . . . Hannah tosses off linguistic gems on almost every page. . . . Reading today's fiction is too often like eating stale bread. With Hannah, just imagine your most mouthwatering meal, take a double helping and you've come close to the pleasure of reading this book. . . . Arguably his finest.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“A master, a dark-laughter raconteur . . . Hannah is a writer that young writers should read to get rid of their inhibitions and become more fully aware of what it is possible to get away with in prose. . . . Mesmerizing.”

—Duff Brenna,
The San Diego Union-Tribune

“An ambitious ensemble piece with . . . no downtime between the brilliant parts. It's a shame that Hannah has so little contemporary competition, because his readers may be out of shape for such richness, such relentless, hell-bent writing. Line by line, Hannah beats on his sentences until they give in and turn beautiful. Readers who underline good sentences could put down their pens and consider the entire book underlined.”

—Ben Marcus,
The Village Voice

“Maddeningly brilliant . . . A mélange of burlesque and tragedy. It's as if Fellini had taken a wrong turn to wind up in Mississippi. . . . [Hannah is] a master.”

—Jean Charbonneau,
The Hartford Courant

“A masterpiece of ensemble performances linked together by prose that is lustrous, baroque, and burnished with Hannah's unique brand of beauty.”

—
Bomb

“A wonderfully baroque orgy of fornication, degradation, and salvation. . . . It's misleading to emphasize the bizarre in Hannah's fiction at the expense of the beauty and the absolute control of his prose. His attention to language produces sentences so finely honed, they have the rhythms of poetry.”

—Julia Hanna,
The Boston Phoenix

“Compelling . . . Barry Hannah writing into the millennium is in a way as disorienting as that other old magician, Bob Dylan, turning sixty. Thankfully, Hannah's talent for building a sentence to seem as rich, earthy, and casually flung as a handful of river mud while hiding its painstakingly assembled armature on the inside, has survived into the Information Age.”

—Brian Farnham,
Newsday

“Hannah's most intricately structured and most successful long work—a thick gumbo of demon-driven souls . . . A narrative poet on the Homeric model, specifically T. E. Lawrence's prose translation of Homer. As with Lawrence, Hannah's lived-in, scholarly fidelity to the wilderness and warfare that he must translate into prose causes words to detonate in such a way that they make moments of the most fantastic action and insight feel anchored in the everyday.”

—F.X. Feeney,
L.A. Weekly

“The thrill of a new Barry Hannah novel is in the guarantee of originality. . . . The overall effect [of
Yonder Stands Your Orphan
] takes on the spirit of the famous sixteenth-century painting by Hieronymus Bosch,
The Garden of Earthly Delights
.”

—Monica Drake,
The Oregonian
(Portland)

“The first outing in a decade from the great southern roustabout goes on a long tear through the lives of a motley crew of misfits living around a giant lake in the backwoods of Missisippi. Hannah kicks it off on a raging blast of language and keeps winging higher and higher. . . . A masterwork of Southern beat terror gospel.”

—
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“
Yonder Stands Your Orphan
finds award-winning writer Barry Hannah in full throat, releasing inimitable, word-sodden Southern wails. . . . A hilarious and incisive satirist of the contemporary South.”

—Jay Jennings,
Time Out New York

“Vintage Hannah, a book only he could write: lots of low-down local color, equal amounts of bigger-picture desperations. And plenty of sex and violence. . . . Melancholy and hopeful.”

—Melissa Malouf,
Raleigh News & Observer

“Nothing less than a modern allegory of good and evil . . . It may be acolytes of Graham Greene, in particular disciples of his long-suffering whiskey priest, who find the book most satisfying. . . . In the end, if it is true that the dark side of the force is more powerful than anyone originally thought, it is also true that not even old Scratch himself can squirm out of harm's way if a few resolute souls follow the better angels of their nature.”

—John Harper,
The Orlando Sentinel

“The writing is formidable . . . A dry Southern wit lurks just beneath the surface.”

—Anthony Quinn,
The New York Times Book Review

“One can open [Barry Hannah's] books at random and without knowing a thing about the plot become immersed in the radiance of his prose. Fans have been known to run up long-distance bills sharing passages with friends. But when asked whom Mr. Hannah is like, the aficionados must reply, ‘No one.'
Yonder Stands Your Orphan
is further evidence that this is the only honest answer.”

—Scott Morris,
The Wall Street Journal

“A wildly colorful, darkly comic, and ultimately sinister tale of madness and murder.”

—Lawrence Rungren,
Library Journal

“Throughout a dozen books in nearly thirty years, Hannah's prose has been legendarily graceful, inventive, voracious, and startlingly direct. In
Yonder Stands Your Orphan
, the sentences still retain their almost supernatural ability to bend, warp, and angle, while his characterization—running the gamut from young boys to aging beauties to old farts fishing from the docks—is sly yet sharp. . . . So original and so amazingly well wrought as to be absolutely unforgettable.”

—Stephen Deusner,
Memphis Flyer

“An unnerving romp . . . a Southern tale that pulsates with men and cars and guns and knives and sex and thwarted love and honor . . . a savvy book built on two skeletons and an orphanage . . . honest and true.”

—Carol Herman,
Washington Times

“A magnificently, almost magically, gifted stylist. His sentences . . . burn into the reader's consciousness with their lush but never overly wrought metaphors. He cannot be bested when it comes to creating wildly eccentric, yet quite believable, characters, and this novel is a gallery of some of his most imaginative creations.”

—Brad Hooper,
Booklist

YOUR ORPHAN

Barry Hannah

Copyright © 2001 by Barry Hannah

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003

Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America

FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hannah, Barry.

Yonder Stands Your Orphan / Barry Hannah.

p. cm.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4646-6

1. Vicksburg (Miss.)—Fiction. 2. Murderers—Fiction. 3. Sheriffs—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3558.A476 Y66 2001

813′.54—dc21                                                                                2001018846

Design by Laura Hammond Hough

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

INSIDE AT THE WALNUT BAR LEANED THE DISAMBULATORY
god of the lake. The man was both lazy and quick. Many sought him out.

You needed the luck, the stories, the bait, the clarity of the water, the barometric report.

The roadhouse was a mile from Eagle Lake, a plank box of one warped room a mile off the Vicksburg highway and up a piece of neglected gravel. It harked back to the fifties, when Vicksburg was wide open. Cecil and Robbie had been coming down from the Delta ever since the days of cotton prosperity. They remembered an era of state prohibition and the curious black-market tax and the Mulberry Street fleshpots. The river walk where bottles of cheap liquor and wine were sold in bathtubs, teenagers and policemen shopping side by side.