Publishers Weekly
Bill's resolutely unsentimental debut collection lays bare working-class strife, exposing atrocities that are at once violently harrowing and desperately human. Pitchfork and Darnel Crase, the two brothers in "Hill Clan Cross," exact cruel revenge on their young kinfolk who've been busy skimming their drugs to sell on the side. In "These Old Bones," the boys' mother murders their father once she discovers he'd pimped out their granddaughter, Audry. Elsewhere, in "Officer Down (Tweakers)," Moon, a police officer whose wife leaves him, kills his estranged best friend who'd become involved in the meth business; in a companion story, menace waits for Ina, his cheating wife. The title story features more downtrodden, reckless men who bet on dogfights with embittered Afghanistan war veterans, then lose and commit even more desperate acts. Readers who enjoy coal-black rural noir are in for a sadistic treat: flowing like awful mud and written in pulpy style, these stories paint a grisly portrait of the author's homeland. You might want to have your brass knuckles handy when reading. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Bill's ever violent and never dull stories [are] a blend of Midwest Gothic and country pulp . . . [They're] over the top, but in a good way, in the way that Quentin Tarantino's first film, Reservoir Dogs, was over the top. Bill never cheats on the smells and sounds of carnage. . . . [T]his book delivers.” —The Seattle Times
“The hard- scrabble realism of these 17 stories will bring to mind the Ozark writer Daniel Woodrell and shades of Cormac McCarthy and Dorothy Allison—offering a view of American lives and mores that may as well be from a different planet . . . Rural idyll this is not—but it is as riveting as anything you may read in the near term.” —The Daily Beast (Best Debuts of the Fall list)
“Flowing like awful mud and written in pulpy style, these stories paint a grisly portrait of the author's homeland. You might want to have your brass knuckles handy when reading.” —Publishers Weekly
“This gritty, violent debut collection begins rather like pulp genre fiction then deepens into something much more significant and powerful. Set in a dilapidated, seedy, nightmare version of southern Indiana, complete with meth labs, dog-fighting rings, and all manner of substance abuse, the stories are connected by recurring characters. The collection opens with vignettes focused mainly on carnage.” —Library Journal
“Good Lord, where in the hell did this guy come from? Blasts off like a frigging rocket ship and hits as hard as an ax handle to the side of the head after you've eaten a live rattlesnake for breakfast. One of the wildest damn rides you're ever going to take inside a book.” —Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff
“Frank Bill's characters all seem to be hurtling at ninety miles an hour down dead end streets, and his recounting of their passage is vivid and unforgettable. Like Barry Hannah on amphetamines, but the voice is undeniably Bill's own.” —William Gay, author of Provinces of Night
“What can I say about this book? This: planning a summer trip north from Mississippi, these stories caused me to reroute to avoid Southern Indiana. Mr. Bill knows his people well, and writes like they live—on the edge of the edge. Just plain unforgettable fiction.” —Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
“When you're composing your hardbitten pantheon—Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Patricia Highsmith, Big Jim Thompson, Elmore Leonard—save room for Frank Bill, whose Crimes in Southern Indiana reminded me how thrilling and darkly vital crime fiction used to be and is again.” —Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil's Territory
“These stories form the ideal nexus between literary art and pulp fiction: beautifully crafted, compulsively readable, and as addictive as crystal meth.” —Pinckney Benedict, author of Dogs of God and The Wrecking Yard
“Take the bark of a .45, the growl of a rusted-out muffler, and the banshee howl of a methhead on a three-day bender, and you approximate the voice of Frank Bill, a startlingly talented writer whose stories rise from the same dark lyrical well as those of Daniel Woodrell and Dorothy Allison.” —Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh
“How can I not love a writer whose work reminds me in a huge way of some of my favorite writers: Lansdale, Woodrell, Willeford, Thompson, and Faulkner? Crimes in Southern Indiana is a brutal, hilarious, honest, unforgettable book, and Frank Bill is the freshest new voice to emerge on the crime fiction scene in recent years.” —Jason Starr, author of The Pack
“Say you're driving down a country road, midnight, a beer in your lap, and you corner into a two-car head-on collision that's one of the most horrible things you've ever seen, so horrible that you've just gotta stop, and then, say, when you've gotten out and you're poking around the body parts trying to figure out what's what, you turn your head just right and catch the way the moonlight lays glittering over the twisted metal and bloodslick asphalt, and you're struck breathless by the eerie beauty of it all. That's what Frank Bill's writing is like. It's that stark, that brutal, and just that beautiful.” —Benjamin Whitmer, author of Pike
“Frank Bill does to crime fiction what a rabid pit bull does to his favorite chew toy. You'll need a neck brace after whipping through these wild, wonderful, whacked-out stories.” —Derek Nikitas, author of Pyres
“Crimes in Southern Indiana brings to light a major American writer of fiction, the prose equivalent of a performance by Warren Oates or a song by Merle Haggard or a photograph by Walker Evans. Tempting though it is to compare him to other writers, the fact is that five years hence every good new fiction writer to come into view will be compared to Frank Bill.” —Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest
“The first time I read a story by Frank Bill it was like watching a redneck opera in another language. No idea what was going on, but I was dying to find out. I wanted more, more, more until I finally learned how to speak 'Frank Bill.' He is a completely original voice in the literary arena, and will take on any challengers with his bare hands. I'm continually in awe of the stories he tells and the insane way he tells them.” —Anthony Neil Smith, author of Yellow Medicine and Hogdoggin'
Library Journal
This gritty, violent debut collection begins rather like pulp genre fiction then deepens into something much more significant and powerful. Set in a dilapidated, seedy, nightmare version of southern Indiana, complete with meth labs, dog-fighting rings, and all manner of substance abuse, the stories are connected by recurring characters. The collection opens with vignettes focused mainly on carnage. But as readers go deeper, the stories lengthen, with Bill turning his attention to psychology and character development and bringing the community to life in fascinating ways. Many of the male protagonists are combat veterans, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and many of the characters—women as well as men—solve problems through lethal violence. Take Scoot McCutchen, who murders the wife he loves when she falls terminally ill. Bill's characters live in a fractured world where there are no good jobs, not much respect for life, and not much hope. It's a bleak, hard-boiled vision of America. VERDICT Recommended for fans of literary fiction but not for the faint of heart.—Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
MARCH 2012 - AudioFile
The Indiana Tourism Bureau may be a bit upset with Frank Bill's novel, which makes the state sound like a scary place populated by incestuous, murderous, meth-addicted monsters with bad teeth and no manners. Tom Stechschulte performs this collection of intertwined short stories. Characters like “Knee-High,” “Moon,” and “Pinebox Willie” make each story as colorful as their names. Stechschulte is perfect—he even sounds dirty as he slips in and out of the personas of characters living on the wrong side of the law. You'll want to take a shower after his lurid descriptions of rape and murder. M.S. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
A dark, hard-boiled debut consisting of interconnected short stories.
No doubt about it, Bill can write. His sentences are terse and clipped: You'll feel as though some backwoods cracker has taken a break from cookin' meth or beatin' his wife to tell you these stories. It's a book without heroes, just a few reasonably decent people surrounded by others you'd want to scrape off the sole of your shoe. Redeeming qualities are rare in the characters, who have colorful names like Knee High, Pine Box and Pitchfork. Oh, and Dodo. Women are raped, brains are splattered and faces are sliced. A man gets his grandson whacked, bullet to the head, to teach that boy a lesson. Cross your kin, you wind up in Hill Clan Cross Cemetery, "where bad deals were made good and lessons were buried deep." A woman goads her husband to kill her father, who's always called her a whore. A guy skims cash from MS-13, Mara Salvatrucha, the most dangerous gang anywhere. A dicey idea at best. A woman leaves her husband, gets gang-raped, maybe gets even, maybe doesn't. Readers will be rapt or repelled by the fast pace and near-constant violence that makes James Lee Burke's books look like kiddy lit. The stories are well told, though, and will get the readers' adrenaline flowing, maybe the bile rising, too. Some characters appear in several of the stories, but the one constant thread is the setting. Ordinarily this might work well, but this collection would have benefited from having a central character the reader could root for. Most of the characters are simply bone-marrow bad, and their stories leave an acrid taste about the human condition.
Aficionados of crime writing likely will love the stories and their crackling excitement. Others, if they even finish the book, will at least appreciate the well-crafted prose.
