Lightwood, by Steph Post, reviewed by Jay Gertzman

Lightwood

By Steph Post

Polis Books

302 pp.

$15.99

Reviewed by Jay A Gertzman

Steph Post is a prime candidate for renown in her genre. The comparison that comes to mind is with David Joy. His Where All Light Tends to Go (Putnam’s, 2015) is similar to Post’s Lightwood in precisely reported setting, tough but conflicted characters, dead mothers, sustaining and/or hindering loved ones, help from unexpected places, injured self-respect, a need for adventure, and bloodletting reaching toward Grand Guignol depths. In addition to all these rudiments of 20^th-century pulp noir, both writers give their protagonists’ struggles for independence from community and family ties an almost biblical intensity. Maybe that helps explain the similarity in their names, Judah and Jacob.

Judah Cannon’s surname reflects Genesis 29:35. Judah (“praise”), was a founder of a new family line; his father was Jacob; King David and Christ were descendants. Post’s Judah—when we first meet him—is in no such position, because he is too loyal to the values he has received growing up in Silas, a hardscrabble Florida town that has been stagnant for a generation. Empty storefronts, weekend assignations, and weaponry stockpiled for the End of Days reflect resignation to a moral code that, in its strictly enforced absolutism, has become shabby. For example, Judah has stayed helpful to his estranged, contemptuous wife, and to his bullying father, because he has been taught men do not abandon family. Unlike his girlfriend Ramey, he has not learned to prioritize self-respect over self-defeating obligation. Thus, he accepts his wife’s demand that he not see their child.

Post’s themes preclude backgrounding the dignity of rural Americans’ creative perseverance, as do not only Breece Pancake, Chris Offutt (Kentucky Straight), Bonnie Jo Campbell (American Salvage), and Carolyn Chute, but also Martin McDonagh in his film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In contrast, Ramey and Judah make a stark contrast to their fellow citizens in Silas, whose beaten-down resignation is evident in their TV binging, their heavy drinking, and their need for firearms to protect their property.

Judah had just finished a 3-year prison sentence, taking the rap for a Cannon family theft from the Scorpions, a slap-dash and vicious gang of bikers dealing in cocaine. His father, Sherwood, has told him, “without family, you got nothing. But with family, you got everything. . . .” He said this “with a dangerous scowl,” one people have learned is a dire warning.

Judah’s younger brother, Benji, has not become embittered or resentful. He has an easy-going friendliness. He takes after his mother. (Her death, like that of Joy’s protagonist’s, produced a grief both men must bury; the pain still eats at them and possibly is a factor in their fathers’ cruelty.) Benji is dragged to the point of death by the Scorpions to scare Sherwood into giving back the drug money (which of course does not happen). At this point Judah confesses his guilt for Benji’s near-fatal torture. “I went along with it, again.” He states this in a public place. Why would he do that? To survive any crisis takes self-respect. That comes as a result of confidence, which in turn comes with experience. Where do you learn those traits, in an isolated small town, where your own father and brother stop you from doing so, and beat the crap out of you if you start to? “Stupid, cowardly worm, who can’t even think for himself.” Now he starts to.

Judah’s unaccustomed outburst endangers Sherwood’s plans. He’s growing up, and Sherwood and his brother Levi pound him bloody for it. Ramey, who Sherwood admits “has some balls” (interesting but unlikely observation), helps by pulling a gun to stop the beating. One trait of noir literature is trust and courage emerging from unlikely places.

Ramey and Judah not only sleep together; they dream together, of an independent future, one where the strengths of rural life can revive out of the coffin of obedience to authorities like Sherwood. Judah must find the clue to how to channel his ability to think for himself into independence of heart and soul. Ramey has already done so. “She was … desperately trying to be the woman her own mother never had the courage to be.” “I’ve always been my own. But I think,” she tells Judah, “we carry a part of each other. Always have. Always will.” What she will never do is become a brittle, disposable object such as lightwood.

A prime noir characteristic is extreme violence. That is provided not only by what happens to Benji, but by a Grand Guignol all by herself, Sister Tulah, fire and brimstone preacher with a captive congregation she terrifies with starvation, sensory overload, and demands for tithes they dare not withhold. It’s as if she has emerged as the ultimate monster that Sherwood and the bikers had unwittingly conjured up from hell. Her weird pale eyes hide an essential emptiness of the least drop of humanity. She fears only snakes, I suppose in deference to her boss, Satan. He is the only one, she might think, powerful enough to make her suffer as she has done to her own acolytes.

I don’t know of many similar characters in contemporary rural noir. I think of Jim Thompson’s deformed Ruthie in Savage Night, who leads Little Bigger, hit man extraordinaire, to a death that “tastes good.” The shack where it all goes down, way down, has a sign in the yard: “The way of the transgressor is hard.”

Sherwood and Tula have to work together to find the stolen money. It is needed by a phosphate corporation to bribe local politicians. In a powerful denouement, securing that money becomes Sherwood’s baptism of fire. Tulah remains. Judah and Ramey wind up with the filthy lucre his father has accumulated. On to Walk in the Fire. Obviously, fire has many implications, both hellish and cleansing.

Post’s novel exemplifies a fascinating contrast between classic and contemporary noir. In the former, those who, like Bigger in Savage Night, or Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me, embrace absolute megalomaniacal control end in literal fire. It tastes good, or they laugh. (For another scary example, see Charles Williams’ The Hot Spot). Protagonists in Woolrich, Goodis, Gil Brewer, Margaret Millar, Dorothy Hughes, and Charles Williford bind themselves to a malevolent fate they can only stoically accept. While the difficulties of forging satisfying human connections are clear in rural noir, the possibilities of securing mutuality can be realized, and enjoyed. Perseverance is fulfilling, not simply the mark of a noble loser. So it is in Woodrell, Bonnie Campbell, Denis Johnson, Larry Brown, and Steph Post. Its radical nature has everything to do with cleansing.

Jay Gertzman is the author of Pulp, According to David Goodis, which was nominated for best non-fiction study of the mystery genre for 2019. A Prof Emeritus at Mansfield University, his specialties are literary censorship, the publisher Samuel Roth, and 20^th century  mass market pulp crime fiction.