I received an advance reader's copy of [Gods of Howl Mountain] through NetGalley. Set in the 1950s in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, the novel focuses on Granny May and her grandson Rory as they struggle to come to terms with a traumatic past that has left Rory's mother and her daughter locked up in an insane asylum. 

The opening scenes of the novel offer a view of what might seem a stereotypical mountain grandmother, rocking and smoking on the porch of her cabin. But while she does seem to be everyone's granny, offering mountain remedies for ailments and tending to her grandson and his friend, she also wields a shotgun with ease and has her own past to contend with. Plus, she isn't above a bit of malicious fun when it comes to those who judge her. 

Rory, her grandson, home from the Korean War minus a leg, works in the moonshine trade, dodging the revenuers and locals in his big Ford. He is a somewhat reluctant participant but it is the work available to him. One night, he stumbles upon a group of frenzied Pentecostals worshipping in an old garage, speaking in tongues and handling snakes. The scenes of the church have a surreal quality as we move into the crowd with Rory, mesmerized by the chanting and dancing.

The novel itself seems to pulse with the life of the mountains and Taylor Brown uses rich prose to describe people and places. It threatens every so often to spill over into excess but Brown manages to keep control, much like his main characters controls the big Ford. His world is one of raw life: violence, sex, love, grief all rolled into complex characters.

In the mountains of North Carolina in the mid-twentieth century, there aren’t a lot of options for making money. For the women, it’s the mills or prostitution. Or, in the case of Granny May, prostitution and then backwoods healing. For the men, it’s the mills of whiskey. Granny May’s grandson, Rory, became a whiskey runner after he lost his leg in Korea. In Taylor Brown’s Gods of Howl Mountain, we watch the two of them do their best to keep themselves going in spite of their hardships—which have just gotten a lot harder with a new federal revenue man in town and a troublemaker who has decided that he needs to teach Rory a fatal lesson.

Granny May is one of the most terrific characters I’ve read in a while. She takes no crap and delights in saying naughty things around her grandson. She smokes an unnamed plant, makes cures for any ailment under the sun, and blows a hole in the roof when she hears what sounds like a panther scream up there. I could have read an entire book about her because she’s fascinating. Her grandson, Rory, is interesting in a less flashy way. He suffers flashbacks and pain in his lost leg. After tangling with another whiskey runner, Cooley, Rory ends up in an escalating series of showdowns with the disturbing man.

Just to make things even more interesting, there are also interstitial scenes that help explain how Granny May and Rory ended up together on their mountain. This subplot becomes important in the book’s climax, but I was entertained enough with the fighting, Granny’s antics, and all the car racing. There’s hardly a moment in this book where the characters have a chance to catch their breaths.

Gods of Howl Mountain is a gripping read, with a good blend of pathos and humor and plenty of action. For readers looking for something that will give them a taste of the hard and wild life of Appalachia, this book is the perfect choice.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration. It will be released 20 March 2018.

Wasn't my cup of tea and I don't want to write a super negative review but, thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to get an advanced readers copy.

It took me a long time to finish this book. Not because I didn't like it and couldn't get into but because I knew that I was reading that rare elusive novel that I am in always in search of. Every line in this book is soaked with beautiful prose and nuance. It is a book to be savored slowly a little at a time. I have found in my opinion the perfect trifecta in David Joy, Wiley Cash and now Taylor Brown. If you haven't discovered this amazing author yet you are going to disappoint yourself if you don't pick up a copy of this book as soon as it's released. Happy reading!

Set in the 1950’s in the rural mountains of North Carolina, Taylor Brown brings to life a gritty, dark southern drama complete with bootlegging, murder and mystery.  The characters are tough and difficult to like.  

Rory Docherty is a veteran of the Korean War who made it home with a wooden foot.  He suffers from PTSD and lives his life on the edge as a bootlegger.  His hobby is fast cars and drag racing.

Rory lives with his grandmother, Granny May, a former prostitute who is known for her home remedies of herbs and poultices.  She is also the keeper of many secrets.  

Bonni, Rory’s mother and daughter to Granny May, has been confined to a mental hospital and does not speak.  She is very much a part of the story, in spite of her silence and years of separation from the mountain and her family.

It seems much of the story revolves around Bonni and the mystery of what happened to cause her to lose her voice.  I loved the flashbacks of Bonni and Connor, as it was Bonni’s only voice in the story, other than her drawings.

The story does include violence, racing, snake handling and some sexual content.  It was a bit too dark for my preference, but definitely fit the setting and the characters involved.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Doubleday Books, Doubleday for providing me with an advance copy.

Hoo whee this was a wild ride of a book. Up and down the mountain, roundabout and back again. 

Have to say the story didn't suck me in right at the beginning, it was a slow burn but a good one. Good action, great ending. Nice suspense throughout. Dark, dank, dirty, and dastardly. 

A rare page turner.

The 1950's in the mountains of South Carolina are a difficult place to live. This is the story of one families struggle to survive, through all means possible. The bootlegging seems more normal than the cult-like church in town. The way that Taylor Brown describes life seems accurate, however, parts seemed unrealistic to me and could have been left out.

I would like to thank the author and Net Galley for the ARC and the opportunity to read this book.

Wow oh Wow.. What a story…. I loved this book!!! The writing was superb and the story was told well. This book is set in the 1950’s in the mountains of North Carolina. Prohibition has set in, and the black market for alcohol was delivered by fast cars, rough rides, and bad cops. I so enjoyed this book, I was immediately won over by Rory, a war veteran who lost his leg in the Korean War and lives with his grandmother. Granny May is a gem, gun toting, pipe smoking, taunted as an outcast because of her “herb” remedies and her past way of life. She is the most enlightening character who won my heart. 
This book had me out right laughing sometimes, and during the day I would smile and chuckle to myself just thinking about what I had read earlier. I even book marked a few of Granny May’s quips on my Kindle to tell my husband about later. It covers fast cars, even explains what is under the hood, how they were built and is so descriptive that you can hear them rumble and envision a race down the back roads. You’ve got good guys, bad guys, fed’s, revenuers and even a snake handling preacher.  Rory, Eli and Granny May are characters I will not forget. Yes, there is some sexual content but I did not find it offensive or out of line. 
I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in reliving the North Carolina mountain country in the 1950’s. The beginning of Nascar started here.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an E-arc of this title in exchange for my honest review.  This book is set in 1950s North Carolina (and I love a book set in the south).  The whole vibe called out to me....folk healing, mental illness, eccentric family members.  This book was a delight to read.

Gods of Howl Mountain: A Novel by [Brown, Taylor]

    “A fresh, authentic, and eloquent new voice in American fiction.” - Robert Morgan, New York Times bestselling author of Gap Creek


Synopsis:

In Gods of Howl Mountain, award-winning author Taylor Brown explores a world of folk healers, whiskey-runners, and dark family secrets in the high country of 1950s North Carolina.

Bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood - a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. Slowed by a wooden leg and haunted by memories of the Korean War, Rory runs bootleg whiskey for a powerful mountain clan in a retro-fitted '40 Ford coupe. Between deliveries to roadhouses, brothels, and private clients, he lives with his formidable grandmother, evades federal agents, and stokes the wrath of a rival runner.

In the mill town at the foot of the mountains - a hotbed of violence, moonshine, and the burgeoning sport of stock-car racing - Rory is bewitched by the mysterious daughter of a snake-handling preacher. His grandmother, Maybelline “Granny May” Docherty, opposes this match for her own reasons, believing that "some things are best left buried." A folk healer whose powers are rumored to rival those of a wood witch, she concocts potions and cures for the people of the mountains while harboring an explosive secret about Rory’s mother - the truth behind her long confinement in a mental hospital, during which time she has not spoken one word. When Rory's life is threatened, Granny must decide whether to reveal what she knows...or protect her only grandson from the past.

With gritty and atmospheric prose, Taylor Brown brings to life a perilous mountain and the family who rules it.

About the Author:

TAYLOR BROWN grew up on the Georgia coast. He has lived in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and the mountains of western North Carolina. His fiction has appeared in more than twenty publications, he is the recipient of the Montana Prize in Fiction, and was a finalist in both the Machigonne Fiction Contest and the Doris Betts Fiction Prize. He is the author of Fallen Land (2016) and The River of Kings (2017); Gods of Howl Mountain is his third novel. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

My Thoughts:

I completely devoured this book. It was like being home, in both the best, and worst ways. You know what I'm talking about when you hale from the Appalachia, as I did, and you pick up this book.

I could see my own great grandmother, smoking a pipe on the front porch.

I could see my great uncle running whisky down the side of the mountain.

I could hear my ancestors in the strength and groan of the mountain underneath them for generations.

I could smell the earth and feel the mountain air all around me, escorting me from the warm beaches of Florida back home, to the crisp dangerous mountain wind.

This book was completely magical, in the most honest way that it pictured mountain people, not shying away from the truth in any way.

I highly recommend you pre-order your copy on amazon here. (aff links)

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I was given this book from Netgalley in exchange of my honest review. All opinions stated above are my own.

I don't know what I was expecting, but I can safely say I didn't get what I'd hoped. 

Gods of Howl Mountain follows the exploits of ex-Marine Rory Docherty. After returning to North Carolina, minus a leg (it having been blown off during his time fighting in Korea), Rory is forced to shorten his career expectations. He settles in as a bootlegger--running moonshine and whiskey for his great-uncle in Howl Mountain. His grandmother, having been his sole guardian since birth, after his mother was sent away to a mental hospital, after having borne witness to an unspeakable tragedy that struck her dumb, provides the only foundation Rory has ever known. 

The story isn't a long one, but it was hard to truly get into it due to the lengthy descriptions of the environment. It's clear Brown wanted folks to get a feel for the setting. However, he had a way of overwriting every scene--taking far too much time setting it up, while using no time at all to actually flesh out the characters therein. 

I often felt lulled to sleep by overly long paragraphs. At some point, I wanted to scream, I get it! It's the country. They live on a mountain without much in the way of surrounding civilization. Get on with it, already!

While it's understandable that a scene must be set, there is such a thing as doing too much. For instance, this:

The road glittered before them, a hard thin river rushing down out of the mountains, dropping now and again through dynamited swallows of rock where the air was suddenly cooler and darker, then breaking open again to the light, thrust along sheer ridges over a model-trainman's world of tiny square fields and toy houses, herds of cattle positioned just so in their valley pastures. The silver-barked trees at the higher altitudes looked almost brittle, like skinny-limbed old men reaching for the sky, the leaves already browned and fallen from their upthrust hands.


This book is filled with passages like the one above. Most of them made little, if any, sense; they often felt rambling in nature, honestly. And most felt irrelevant to the arc of the story. 

It would have been nice to see Brown spend more time on Rory, or his mother (Bonni)--even a bit more time on Eli and Eustace would have been nice. 

Each were crucial, in some way, to the plot. 

The only person we are given any real insight into is Granny May.

She's a likable woman, with a strong presence, and it's clear she's the star of the story--despite any allusions to the contrary--and she became the only reason I soldiered on.  

This would've been a much more enjoyable story if the characters were given the same opportunity to shine as the atmosphere. As it were, it fell flat because I didn't feel connected enough so, by the end, I was just glad it was over.

Taylor Brown's newest novel is pure, unadulterated southern gothic at it's brainiest. Rory Docherty is a car repairman living in the heights of Howl Mountain, a mysterious Southern hot spot where murder, violence, and illegality are a gray area, and men are more or less left to rule themselves. Rory runs whiskey for  Eustace, a reclusive, vicious, and powerful overseer of the mountain, and lives with Granny May, a renown medicine woman. He lives with the burden of his experiences in the Korean War, with a prosthetic leg for his efforts, and the weight of his mother's mysterious trauma right before he was born. His father was violently murdered in front of her, and ever since, she has been a mute patient in the nearby psych ward. The family is eager to let the past remain in the past, but they lay claim to an eyeball, lost by the man who led the attack. Rory's bootlegging business makes him many enemies and few friends, other than his close friend Eli, and as he runs closer to danger with the law, he also finds himself closer to the truth of his mother's demise, buried within the secrets of Howl Mountain.


Brown has created a totally authentic sense of the southern gothic style. His extraordinarily detailed world-building has set an amazing landscape of an eerie mountainside, compellingly laden with deeply-rooted history, dark secrets, and danger. The core mystery of Rory's mother is engaging, and as the fans are flamed when we near the truth, I was on the edge of my seat to find out who killed Rory's father, and set so many stones in motion.


The novel is extremely busy and intricate. Rory's experience from wartime often has an effect on the danger he nears within his bootlegging activities. His family is daunted by the mystery in their past, and Rory takes it upon himself to solve it, all the whole maintaining his day job as a car repairman and racing aficionado. Rory finds himself repeatedly running into his bootlegging completion, Cooley Muldoon, and their feud reaches an exciting and violent boiling point.
No matter what fragment of these plot lines you read, the context and development is incredibly detailed and fully fleshed-out. The only hindrance here is that there is so much content. There is honestly something for everyone, but it borders on being too much for anyone. Personally, I found my interest lagging whenever Rory started talking about cars (which was often), but it would fortunately pick right back up again when he spoke about their family's past.


The prose is elaborate and sophisticated, but initially threw me off balance from its wordiness. Several of the first few chapters were so stuffed with similes that I lost track of any action or information. During dialogue scenes, the characters speak with a southern drawl, and the grammar used reflects this, which did wonders for furthering the authenticity, but also made it occasionally difficult to interpret.


Finally, the novel has a consistently strange way of describing and depicting sexual appeal and activity. He particularly goes to great lengths to find different ways of describing women's breasts. Phrases like "pert as a bird", ""sharp as weapons", "nipples like hard little stems", "nipples hard as buttons", "her nipples berry-firm", and "her breasts hug heavy as dove, upturned and pert, the nipples hard as stone pebbles" are abundant. He uses the words "nipple" and "breast" 29 times in the book, and there aren't even that many actual sex scenes. Honestly, the persistent attempts to draw weird comparisons between boobs and nature are anything but sexy, and the sexuality of he book trends toward sounding like it was written a youthful boy with a hyperactive sex drive and an affinity for bad metaphors.


Gods of Howl Mountain is full of dark intrigue, well-choreographed action and violence, and a detailed commitment to the creepiness requisite of southern gothic. While the character development is minimal, and the cast can be hard to connect with, they are compelling part of a deep set of storylines that kept me engaged in the eerie world of Howl Mountain.
Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan Publishers for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

A gritty tale about bootlegging in 1950s North Carolina. The main characters in this fantastic, atmospheric story are pipe smoking 'healer' Granny May and her grandson, Rory, seriously scarred both physically and mentally by his time in Korea.  There is also a dark murder mystery running, in flashbacks mostly, throughout the book.  This involves Bonni, mother to Rory and Granny May's daughter, who has been left mute and institutionalised for two decades following a horrific attack that left a young man dead. 

I really enjoyed this book, which has a very cinematic feel throughout and fantastic characters, some of whom are not all they first appear to be.  Rarely have I read a character as fantastic as Granny May.  What a woman! 

A totally engrossing read with a very satisfying ending.

It's the 1950's in Howl Mountain,North Carolina. Rory is back from the Korean War, minus one leg, but alive. Living with his grandmother up on the mountain, making a living running shine and trying to evade the government men and the competition.

His mother is in a mental institution and hasn't spoken a word since she was sentenced there. Only she knows what really happened to put her there. There are many stories and secrets that everyone would just like to see stay buried. And Granny is one of those. 

How far will things go before she may have to take action?

This is the first of Brown's books that I have read, but not the last. Great Job!

NetGalley/St.Martin's Press March 20, 2018

A raw, thrilling and ultimate fulfilling portrayal of one man and his amazing community cut off from the outside world and yet constantly working to influence it.

Great story set in the North Carolina Mountains in the 1950s. The setting is depicted authentically and the story has a mystery at its heart. What beautiful writing! Every chapter composed elegantly like a short story in itself! The author takes you to the place of moon shine and snake handlers.

When it comes to protagonists, Taylor Brown has changed that paradigm in his novel Gods of Howl Mountain. Rory Docherty is a wounded Korean veteran, back home to bootleg liquor, clash with local factions, evade the law, and appease all his family. He is a gritty car guy who knows the long history of the mountain and the mill town at the bottom of the valley. While Rory is a cut-throat stock car racer and bootlegger, he also knows the mountain and people. A novel as much about place and time as it is story and conflict. 

Rory has returned with a missing leg. Living with his grandmother, in the mountains, they live among the herbal remedies and folklore that haunts the misty mountains. When Rory falls in love with the daughter of a snake-handling preacher, their world is pulled apart by violence, rivalries, love, and ghosts from the past.

Thinking that some evil has invaded Rory's heart, Granny May keeps her shotgun close and her distrust closer. She is mystical in her mountain herbal remedies and her shotgun judgments of the world. Her life as a matriarch and medicine woman draws people to her who want different cures for what ails their lives in town. She also is the link between Rory and the mother he never knew. 

Taylor Brown's prose is as mystical and lyrical as the ghosts high in the mountains. It is not always a beautiful place, but the mountain, the people, and the hard lives all resonant with a profound beauty that shifts from grace and wisdom to deceit and violence. Brown has masterfully crafted this world, grounding in the reader a sense of place and time in America, now long gone.

I have never read a book by this author before. It was a gritty book and explosive in parts.

4 sassy southern stars 🌟🌟🌟🌟

This book was true southern grit lit (I didn’t even know that was a thing, but it sure does describe this book perfectly)... I really do enjoy southern Fiction....  the south seems to be very rich with fascinating history.....

This was a character driven novel and I absolutely adored the characters in this book.... Granny May was the best!  if I lived in the appellations in the 50s I’d want to be just like her.... without her past.... OK maybe I wouldn’t want to be just like her, but she sure was an amazing and interesting character.... she told you how it was and was not politically correct in how she told you... she also dabbled in herbal healing which I found extremely interesting.... and which also made her neighbors believe she could possibly be a witch..... Rory her grandson who she raised because his mother had a breakdown of sorts was also an interesting character..... Home from the Korean war with scars both on the inside and out.... Rory believed if he found the answers to all of his questions he will find closure, but some answers lead to even more questions.....

The pace of this book was a bit slow and I also found it a little wordy.... there was a lot going on moonshiners, stock car races, snake handling, love interest, secrets, family feud, etc. I think it all tied up neatly and nicely at the end..... however I spent a lot of the book a bit overwhelmed with everything that was going on....

There are a lot of amazing reviews for this book and I really wish I loved it as much as others.... but for the reasons stated above I didn’t, I really liked it I just did not love it.... I would recommend if you are a fan of southern fiction, historical fiction, and very descriptive writing with some fun quirky characters thrown in....

*** i’d like to thank the publisher and Net Galley for a copy of this book ***