THE LINE THAT HELD US
David Joy
Putnam Books
ISBN 978-0-399-57422-1
Hardcover
Fiction

I set all else aside when a new book by David Joy is published. Joy’s prose, characters, and plotting are nothing more or less than consistently magnificent. THE LINE THAT HELD US, Joy’s third novel (after the much and deservedly acclaimed WHERE ALL LIGHT TENDS TO GO and the unforgettable THE WEIGHT OF THIS WORLD), once again returns the reader to the dark, harsh world of the Appalachian mountains and its people which Joy knows intimately and well.

The plot of THE LINE THAT HELD US is complex but not complicated. The reader meets Darl Moody in the first few sentences of the book. Darl is involved in poaching --- hunting deer out of season --- while trespassing on Coon Coward’s land while the owner is absent. He justifies both transgressions based on need, though it is evident that he is taking a shortcut. His actions, however well or poorly intended, end tragically when he accidentally shoots Sissy Brewer, the impoverished scion of a notoriously dangerous Appalachian family who is also trespassing on Coward’s land while hunting for ginseng. Darl in a panic recruits his best friend Calvin Hooper to hide Sissy’s dead body, a a task to which Calvin, Darl’s best friend, reluctantly but whole-heartedly acquiesces. Dwayne Brewer, Sissy’s brother, goes looking for him when he does not return from his clandestine ginseng harvesting. Dwayne limited resources consist of an animal cunning, a fearsome temper, and the borrowing of a bit of technology from an unexpected source. Dwayne, as we learn early on in THE LINE THAT HELD US, is a multi-layered soul, one who is not above distributing some appropriate rough justice to a bully in a local Walmart. While not smart in the manner of which such things are usually defined, b he is clever and forcefully manipulative. Dwaine in short order is able to track his brother’s disappearance first to Darl, then to Calvin, and to Calvin’s girlfriend, Angie, who has her own secret which she is keeping close to her heart. Dwayne’s plan is simple enough. He is going to exact a revenge of biblical Old Testament inspiration, one which will turn the lives of those who did his brother wrong, by accident and intent, with a straightforward and terrible finality. Dwayne’s actions as unjustifiable as they might be, are understandable up to a finite point, given that his brother was virtually all that he had. His revenge, however, quickly spirals out of control and reverberates across the small and closely held impoverished community where he has lived all of his life. Calvin, whose greatest crime is his loyalty to a friend, soon finds that his late night action is about to rain down violence upon those whom he cherishes most, even as Dwayne’s actions become more unstable and uncontrollable.

The enigmatic conclusion to THE LINE THAT HELD US is by turns pre-ordained --- practically from the first page of this remarkable work --- and unexpected. The only thing that is assured from the beginning of the book to the end is that things will become progressively worse for those involved, including a pair of...but that would be telling. This is a tale breathtaking in its violence and beauty, as well as the depth of emotions which it plumbs. Very strongly recommended.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
© Copyright 2018, The Book Report, Inc. All rights reserved.

One of the bleakest books that I've ever read. I have a fairly strong stomach when it comes to violence, but at times the gruesome descriptions made me feel squeamish. Joy's writing is quite good, occasionally verging on poetic, and he has a clear love of nature on full display. I appreciate how so many weighty topics are covered through this complex story and its characters who are painted in shades of grey. That being said, I did not care for how one character holds the cards at all times with little to no deviation and seems invincible. Joy wants readers to sympathize with Dwayne, which I did to an extent, but his fits of rage and self-righteous beliefs make that challenging. I wish that there had been more to Calvin, who is mostly a cipher; the only character who I rooted for was Angie, a true innocent caught in the middle of everything. I also did not particularly care for the ending, which I found frustrating given all that happened preceding it.

This book exceeded my expectations. I didn’t really know what to expect. The description sounded intriguing so I’m really glad I read this one.

Set in the Appalachians, Darl Moody goes hunting (actually poaching) on another man’s land. He is out to get a buck he’s had his eye on. He ends up accidentally killing another man which sets off a number of bad choices and sequences ending in acts of torment and revenge. It will make your heart race and your stomach churn a little. It’s about family and those you love and just how far you would go for those people. Highly recommended!

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC! I can’t wait to read more from David Joy!

"In that moment, he knew that he was standing in the midst of something that would never be forgotten, something he would carry from this place and bear the rest of his life. There was no turning back. That single certainty consumed him."

Darl Moody makes a series of bad decisions. He decides to hunt out of season on another man's land. He is hunting for many reasons: he loves hunting, he helps put food on his sister's table, and he desperately wants to get that back which has eluded him for years. But he makes a horribly tragic mistake- he shoots a man. He knows the man he has shot, Carol "Sissy" Brewer, who was attempting to steal some ginseng at the time he was shot. Brewer comes from a violent family, and Darl, desperate and worried about the consequences of his actions, calls his best friend, Calvin Hooper to help him. Darl and Calvin have been best friends their entire lives, Calvin cannot say no when his friend needs him the most.

"The only reason we're here is because of the ones we loved. That's the line that held us."

Dwayne Brewer goes looking for his brother, Carol, when he fails to show up. Dwayne is not one to let things lie and will not back down until he knows what happened to his brother. Eventually, he learns the truth and goes on a collision course of vengeance and revenge. His brother was the one good thing in his life, the one person he loved. Dwayne will not stop until he makes everyone involved pay for what was taken from him. Dwayne is a mountain of a man who reads the bible, quotes bible verses and firmly believes in "an eye for an eye."

"Things had a way of never leaving these mountains. Stories took root like everything else. He was a part of one now, part of a story that would never be forgotten, and that made bearing the truth all the more heavy."

An accidental shooting in the woods and the deadly aftermath could be a very sad yet simple tale - but not in the hands of David Joy. In the pages of "The Line that held us", Joy has created a beautifully written gritty novel set in Appalachia. This book is violent, heart breaking and gut wrenching. The characters in this book are struggling - struggling with the consequences of their actions, struggling with poverty, struggling with loss, struggling with grief, struggling with keeping secrets, struggling with doing the right thing and struggling to survive. Love, loyalty, friendship, rage, loss, despair, and revenge are all combined and laid bare.

"...that some people were born too soft to bear the teeth of this world. There was no place for weakness in a world like this. Survival was so often a matter of meanness."

I was glued to the pages and found myself highlighting large portions of this book as the writing was eloquent and beautiful. The characters in this book are fully developed. Love them or hate them, we know as a reader what makes each tick, what motivates them, and what they have to lose (if anything). This book won’t be for everyone. There are some very disturbing scenes, but if you can stomach the raw and gruesome sections, you might just be amazed at the vivid and beautiful writing. I had a clear picture in my mind of the characters and the setting the entire time I was reading almost as if I were watching a movie. One can almost feel the feelings of loss, desperation, rage and fear dripping off the pages.

This book is heavy. It's full of raw emotion and I wanted to go hug a puppy after reading this book to clear away some of the gloom. This book is beautifully tragic. The Lien that Held us is beautifully written, well thought out, perfectly paced and hard to put down. I highly recommend this book.

Thank you to Penguin book Putnam and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.

This dark read has all of the elements of a good book: suspense, danger, revenge, and a plot and character that keep the reader invested. Brilliantly written!

......DARK, VERY DARK. "A man's mind is his own kind of hell."

......A tragic accident and a bad decision lead to violence, despair, and revenge with deadly consequences in the Appalachia as an unbalanced BIG BAD GIANT of a man with a history seeks justice for the only one he has ever loved in the world.

......In THE LINE THAT HELD US, there's really not a whole lot to the storyline nor are there many characters, but, oh my, the intensity of the writing does put the fear of what's to come in your bones and pulls the reader right into the tough life with visually deep descriptive prose.

......There is a bit of animal cruelty, but what REALLY makes this DARK read VERY DARK happens to be an (ICK!) morbid fascination......and then there is the ending, that I'm still processing.

......Many thanks to PENGUIN GROUP Putnam via NetGalley for the arc AVAILABLE TODAY in exchange for review. Am pleased to have been able to sample the work of David Joy!

The last David Joy book I read, Where All Light Tends to Go, was one of my favorites of the year in which I read it. So, of course, I had high expectations for this one and I have to say that they fell a bit . . . flat. Don't get me wrong - the writing was great and I think the character development was better than most but it almost was too over the top. The stereotypes, the reactions, the story - it almost felt like a parody. Whereas the last book I read by this author felt unique, authentic and deeply personal and real, this one just felt cobbled together and almost written by an outsider looking in. It was a fast read but it left my heart with a bit of a hole because it could have been so much more.

The Line That Held Us comes out tomorrow on August 14, 2018, and you can purchase HERE.

All his life there'd been a thoughtlessness that came on before the kill. It was something hard to explain to anyone else, but that feeling was on him now as he braced the rifle against the trunk of the oak and tried to steady his aim, a mind whittled back to instinct.

4.5 stars
<i>For whom are you willing to lay down your life?</i>

I actually came across David Joy when I stumbled upon his review for Taylor Brown’s novel [book:Gods of Howl Mountain|34964885]. I liked his writing style and was touched by his taking the time to critically read other authors' works. This is why I was so very glad to have received this ARC. As with <b>Gods of Howl Mountain</b>, <b>The Line That Held Us</b> is very dark, bleak and gritty. Joy’s descriptions are poetic and lush; so full of meaning but unassuming. If I could use his own words against him <i>"These pages sing with authenticity down to the details of cold spring water in enameled tin cups."</i> Joy has a real talent for capturing the human essence. In the dark world painted by <b>The Line That Held Us</b>, the gray areas where the conflicts of our conscience reside are exposed. Questions like <i>What happens when good people do bad things?</i> and <i>Are we ever justified in our actions when we commit acts of violence?</i> are brought to the fore. As a reader you feel strongly for all of the characters. Joy is such a wonderful writer that you are able to relate to Dwayne in his sorrow and his need for retribution. You hurt for him because he has lost his only family even though you don’t want any harm to come to Darl and Calvin. Yet you know disaster is coming. A current of foreboding seeps through the pages as the inhumanity of humanity is revealed. Be warned, David Joy does not white-wash anything. The imagery is so gruesome and raw it evokes a visceral response. As a reader you can’t help but to <i>feel</i> the story unfold. <b>The Line That Held Us</b> by David Joy may be my first David Joy but it most certainly won’t be my last.

<i>For whom are you willing to lay down your life? Till a man knows that, he doesn’t know anything.</i>

David Joy is now one of my favorite authors. I first read his Where all the Light Tends to Go which I enjoyed tremendously. The Line That Held Us has exceeded my expectations. David Joy is one of the finest writers out there!

Set in Appalachia we meet Darl Moody hunting out of season on another’s property. He makes the biggest mistake of his life when accidentally shooting Sissy, the younger brother of the meanest and most terrifying giant of a man, Dwayne Brewer. Darl Moody understands that he has no choice but to cover up the accident and calls his best friend Calvin Hooper to help.

This book is all about the consequences of Darl’s actions. Violent, graphically dark, and gruesome, but also filled with beautiful prose. How David Joy brings violence and beauty together is amazing! This is also about loyalty and friendship, family and brotherly love. Joy’s writing has you liking both the good and bad guys in his novel. That’s hard to do.

This book is also filled with prose about birds and nature. So much so that I have included some wonderful passages:

“Calvin stood to the side and watched a MURDER OF CROWS strut through the churchyard below.”

“Across the road, a MURMURATION OF STARLINGS rose like a bruise from yellowed field. The birds twisted into the sky, flashed in blooms of black, then disappeared as quickly as they’d shown. Their path blinked against the mountainside...”

“...WAKES OF BIRDS came circling over the ridgeline in orbits of ten or twelve and lit on every limb there was to be had...”

“...birds appeared like some BLACK-WINGED CRUCIFIXTION roosted in the trees.”

“...the BROOD OF HENS dashing to the back of the house, his footsteps crunching dead grass.”

It doesn’t matter where you live to enjoy this Southern lit genre. I’m from Boston and find it’s now one of my favorite go-tos.

Read this book. You will never forget it beauty.

5 out of 5 stars

Many thanks to NetGalley, PENGUIN GROUP Putnam, and the terrific David Joy for the ARC.

Review posted to GoodReads on August 10, 2018

I didn't think David Joy could get darker and grittier and more depressing but he did. This novel starts with a bad decision by Darl which cascades into more and more bad decisions by Darl and Calvin, who he pulls in, and Dwayne, who is filled with rage and despair. Set in rural Tennessee, it's beautifully written if at times overly graphic. The violence compounded with the despair these men feel rockets off the page. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. This is one that would make an interesting movie, albeit one that would likely be as hard to watch in spots as this can be to read.

David Joy's novel The Line That Held Us is a novel about what happens when decent people do something terrible that result in even more reverberating, disastrous events.


Darl Moody and Calvin Hooper are life-long friends, each that has sworn life and death loyalty to each other, and when one horrible act occurs, the tale details the events that spiral from the accidental to the repercussions of what happens when one can't do the right thing.

Carol "Sissy" Brewer and Dwayne Brewer are brothers, with "Sissy" being somewhat of a simpleton, while Dwayne is best characterized as an intelligent, violent sociopath.

When the two parties are pulled together by what starts as a horrible accident, the reader soon realizes the story will end in further carnage.

As with his other novels, Joy's descriptive nature is visual and lyrical. One appreciated aspect is how Joy creates a believable story, which includes a plausible reason why good people faced with circumstances that prevent them from doing the right thing.
This novel is highly recommended for those that like novels that are commonly referred as "Southern Noir" or "Southern Grit" fiction.

The Line That Held Us reminds us the consequences we bare, don’t just affect us on an individual basis, but create a ripple across all of the people in our lives and that every person we encounter plays a purpose in our life.

This is a tough lesson Calvin Hooper learns the hard way. His friend, Darl Moody finds himself in a tragic situation. When pouching a buck he’s been hunting for dear, he see’s a creature on all fours rooting in ginseng. He takes his aim and fires. Upon closer, this is Carol “Sissy” Brewer, a family notorious for vengeance and never quite going with the grain of things. Darl calls upon Calvin to help him cover up this accident. Being a devout friend, Calvin helps bury Sissy.

When Sissy doesn’t return home as promised, his brother Dwayne sets off to find his brother. He finds his brother’s car on a man’s property. When he knocks on his door, the game camera see’s no sign of Sissy, but what it does reveal is Darl and Calvin carring something out of those woods.

Leaving no stone unturned, Dwayne pays Darl a visit. Darl spits out a story that seems to buy him time, however when Dwayne leaves, he finds a familiar object in the back of Darl’s truck. Beliving in an eye-for-an-eye, things don’t end well for Darl. Before his passing, he gives the name of Calvin.

Set to make things right, Calvin’s life changes forever. He’s forced to answer the question, how much are you willing to lose? How much sacrifice is one willing to make.

This story was marvelous, definitely a fast-paced read and has the reader devouring the pages. David Joy writes the story honestly, not afraid to go to places that isn’t frequently explored in literature.

Thank you to G.P. Putnam’s Sons and NetGalley for providing me an advanced reader’s copy of the novel and a special thank you to David Joy for crafting a story so raw and provocative.

I absolutely loved this book! Easy five star read for me. It’s the second David Joy book for me and I quite enjoy him as an author. I’ve never lived in the south but I enjoy reading about it apparently. These characters were very real and honest and graphic and written just beautifully. The only downfall I think is that the end just didn’t do it for me. I liked the conclusion, but the actual last few pages I think was going for something deep but just didn’t hit for me. But that’s a minor thing as the actual conclusion to the stories and characters was done well.

Short Summary: Darl Moody knows that he’s poaching when he sets out to go hunting late one night but he’s got many mouths to feed. The bullet he fires intended for an animal turns out to be none other than Carol Brewer who was also poaching on the same land, and instead of owning up to his mistake he buries the body and hopes that his terrifying brother Dwayne doesn’t ever connect the dots.

Thoughts: David Joy’s novels are impressively engaging and invoke the essence of the South in all the best (and terrible) ways

Verdict: The Line That Held Us was a riveting story of the reverberations of vengeance that was poignantly written. In his third novel, David Joy is clearly only getting better.

I received this book free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

This was an absolutely beautiful, bleak as hell, novel. It is the story of a man who is out hunting, and accidentally kills another. The first man calls his best friend to help him bury the body. When the brother of the dead man finds out what has happened, he goes after the two friends to achieve vengeance. It’s a fairly simply plot line, but the characters, the setting and the glimpse into the history that made these people is truly riveting. I found it difficult to put this book down.

I read an advanced reading copy from Penguin Group Putnam via NetGalley. Thanks!

Darl Moody and Calvin Hooper have been best friends forever, and so when Darl has the worst kind of accident, he knows who to turn to. You know what they say real friends will help you bury. The body in question is Carol Brewer; Darl was hunting out of season, and when he glimpsed something moving through the woods he thought it was a wild pig. Turned out he was wrong; turned out to be Carol, poaching ginseng on Coon Coward’s land. But you can’t bring the dead back to life, and you sure can’t call the cops for something like this. Carol is Dwayne’s brother, after all. Dwayne is a huge man, half- crazy and rattlesnake mean. There are no bygones in Dwayne Brewer’s world. There is only revenge.

My thanks go to G.P. Putnam and Net Galley for the galley, which I received free in exchange for this honest review.

“’I’d be lucky if all he did was come after me,” Darl said, “But knowing him, knowing everything he’s done, you and me both know it wouldn’t end there. I bet he’d come after my mama and my little sister and my niece and nephews and anybody else he could get his hands on. That son of a bitch is crazy enough to dig up my daddy’s bones just to set him on fire.”

“[Calvin tells him] “You’re talking crazy, Darl.’

“’Am I?’”

So Carol disappears…for awhile. But Dwayne won’t be satisfied till he knows what has happened to his brother, who is all the family he has left. Once he finds out, of course all hell breaks loose.

Joy is a champion at building visceral characters and using setting to develop them further. I know of no living writer better at describing hard core rural poverty to rival anything the Third World can offer:

"The house had been built a room at a time from scrap wood salvaged and stolen. Nothing here was permanent and as each addition rotted away, a new one was hammered together from plywood and bent nails off another side so that slowly through the decades, the five-room shanty shifted around the property like a droplet of water following the path of least resistance. Red Brewer was no carpenter. Chicken coops were built better. So were doghouses. But this place had been the roof over their heads and had kept the rain off the Brewer clan's backs all Dwayne's miserable life."

The murderous rage of Dwayne Brewer contrasts with the tender, poignant love that exists between Calvin and his girlfriend Angie, who has just learned she is pregnant. Calvin understands throughout all of this that he has a lot to lose, and this makes the conflict between Dwayne and Calvin an unequal one.

I would have liked to see Angie better developed, and I blanched a bit at the line where she thinks that the only important thing is what’s growing in her uterus. But the story isn’t really about Angie, and I have seen Joy develop a strong female character in one of his earlier books. I hope to see more of that in his future work.

Meanwhile, the passage where Dwayne visits Coon Coward—some four or five pages long—just about knocks me over. This is what great writing looks like.

I struggled a bit with the ending, and this is where the fifth star comes off. The first 96 percent of this tale is flat-out brilliant, but I feel as if Joy pulls the ending a bit, and I can’t see why. None of the rest of the book points us toward this conclusion.

Last, the reader should know that there is a great deal of truly grisly material here. We have a torture scene; we have numerous encounters with a decaying corpse. If you are a person that does most of your reading during mealtime, this might not be the best choice.

For those that love excellent literary fiction or Southern fiction, this story is recommended. It will be released August 21, 2018, but you can pre-order it now.

I do believe this is my new favorite by Mr. Joy. As is his style, there is brutality that is most certainly inhumane, but entirely human. Mr. Joy writes as if he is throwing all caution to the wind, holding back nothing for the sake of taboo nor delicacy. And with most of his characters, no one is all good or bad, which is what gives such heart to his storytelling.

Dwayne Brewer is a terrifying man on the outside and mostly the inside also. Yet he is still inherently human and a complete product of his environment, just as Darl and Calvin are products of their environment.

Mr. Joy captures people in their rawest form through his words. It's almost as if he tells all our dirty secrets to the world. And mixed in with those secrets is a setting that is beautiful and open, yet challenging and void of mercy. Growing up in these same mountains, I'm being told of hills and hollows and clearings I've wandered my whole life. David Joy tells the tales of my home and he does it with cruelty and beauty just the same.

This book was wonderfully written. David Joy captures the heart and soul of the people and places of Appalachia. I can't express enough how real these characters felt. This book left me feeling things for the characters, but more importantly it left me pondering things outside of the book. It left me to think about how we treat our environment, our neighbors, and the things we hold dear in life. That was more than I expected and was greatly appreciated.

Copy furnished by Net Galley for the price of a review.

I hit pay dirt with this one.  It's as dark, dirty, and gritty as it needs to be for the story it tells.  Caney Fork, Tennessee.  Here is a place where you carry your own, and where you got to pay what you owe, in a manner of speaking. 

Do not trespass.  Do not poach.  And for the sake of all that is holy, do not pull the trigger unless you know for certain sure what you are aiming at. Think about what you have to lose, and weigh it against what is to be gained.  And know that there are some mistakes that are unforgivable.   

Meet the Brewer boys.  Dwayne is a mountain of a man, glowering and formidable, an avid reader of the Bible, slightly insane.  Carol, nickname of Sissy, is the younger brother, dimwitted, born with a purple birthmark that covers half his face.  He never had a chance.

<spoiler>What's that a'rattlin' around in Dwayne's pocket?  Why, that ain't nothin' but Sissy's pearly whites.</spoiler>

Note, this interview will appear online and in print in Mountain Times (Boone, NC) on Aug. 14, 2018:

Concerned, as always, with what he calls “big ideas,” Appalachia’s David Joy is so gifted a writer that he never lets those ideas get in the way of the story — and so it is with “The Line That Held Us” (Putnam), Joy’s third, most ambitious and best novel to date.

Praise has been heaped high on Joy’s particular brand of Southern noir, and rightly so. The author has been compared to the likes of Ron Rash, Cormac McCarthy and Wiley Cash, and Joy etches ever closer to a place above these and others with this novel. That the author gets his truck just a bit mired in the mud of social observation is perhaps the only miscue, or perhaps is by design. Joy's work is that textured, and through three novels it has been his penchant to ensure that those observations are underpinned by stories moving at full throttle, slinging that mud and forcing us to continuously wipe the windshield.

“The Line That Held Us” is such a story. Testing the bonds of friendship, Darl Moody calls upon Calvin Hooper to help him recover from the unrecoverable: While hunting out of season, Moody accidentally kills Dwayne Brewer’s simple brother, setting off a chain of revenge as horrific as it is undeniably real.

In this novel, Joy packages Rash’s eye and ear for setting and character, Cash’s sense of story and McCarthy’s gift for language. Recently, Mountain Times spoke with Joy from his Jackson County, Tenn., home about those authors, life in Appalachia and where the lines are drawn when it comes to family and friendship. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Mountain Times: You’ve been critiqued as one of the most authentic writers documenting Appalachia today, and this is your third novel set in Jackson County, Tenn. In terms of setting, how does that authenticity translate into your novels?

David Joy: The authenticity comes from the fact that I know this place and that I’ve never shied away from that. I’ve been here most of my life at this point, and I just don’t know anyplace else as intimately as I know Jackson County. A lot of writers sometimes have to imagine a setting, imagine a place and they have to make it up and it becomes this culmination of a whole lot of places, but for me, I never did that. I never really wanted to do that. When I see a character, when I see a story, I see them very specifically where I am. Oftentimes to the point of a tree in a novel like (the author's second work) “The Weight of This World.” There are moments in that book where the characters are at a tree that exists and I could take you and show you where they were. … That’s been something that’s carried through all of my novels, that really strong sense of place. I don’t really ever see that changing. I have no plans of ever leaving here.

MT: How about the same question in terms of character?

DJ: There’s a couple of things happening in terms of characters. This new novel is very different in a lot of ways from anything else I’ve done in the sense that I wanted to write a book about everyday people who find themselves in some type of incredible circumstance. Darl Moody and Calvin Hooper are everyday types of people. With all the other novels I was writing very heavily about criminality and addiction, and that’s because that’s what I know well.

I found out two days ago that one of my childhood friends died of an overdose. That makes three friends I’ve lost to heroin overdoses. I’ve lost either eight or nine friends to suicide. I grew up in a place and around people where addiction was very prevalent. That’s the reality I portray.

One thing I’m always very careful about, though, is that I don’t think that’s indicative of Appalachia as a whole. I don’t think addiction is necessarily more prevalent here than in other places. Often times, addiction is more attached to poverty than it is to region or landscape.

With my novels, I was writing about that because that’s what I know. I know that world. I know those details. I was always very interested in getting to the humanity of that. … Throughout my work I tend to focus on things that are very disturbing, often times violent and I tend to try to find some type of beauty of that. I don’t necessarily know what that says about me. But if you look at my novels, look at my essays, that’s definitely a thread that carries through all of it.

MT: Another thread through your work is the almost fraternal bond between male characters, such as between Calvin and Darl. Bonds similar to those found in this novel, in “The Weight of This World” and “Where All Light Tends to Go,” drive much of the action. Those bonds also ask the question about how far one friend would really go for another. Are you testing the limits of friendship in this and other works?

DJ: Definitely. And I don’t think that that’s crazy, that situation (in "The Line That Held Us"). There’s a moment in there where Calvin is looking back and he’s thinking about all the times when they’d been sitting around, drinking, and one of the friends might have said to the other, “I’d kill somebody for you.” I’ve said that to people that I love. When we say those things we mean them at the time, but you don’t know until the moment arises what you’d do. That’s a question I had with this novel: What do you do if your best friend calls you and you arrive over there and he’s asking you to help cover up a murder or an accidental killing? I was definitely interested in trying to push that just as far as I could, just the same as I’m interested in pushing Dwayne’s story as far as it would go. How far was Dwayne willing to go to hold on to what was left of his brother?

MT: Beyond those fraternal bonds, let’s look at the women in your stories. Although they typically don’t get as much face time as the male characters, the female characters are more intricately drawn, have more depth and in many ways are stronger than the men — especially since much of the harshness in their lives is male-driven. In this novel, Angie, Calvin's girlfriend, is an especially deep, resilient and resourceful character. Talk to me a little about her, and your female characters in general.

DJ: That’s one thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about. Part of it is knowing the danger that you get in if you don’t — especially as a male writer, especially as a white male writer. It doesn’t get any more privileged than that. I spend a lot of time really trying to capture that. Angie and the females are truly the strongest characters in each of my novels, and they are also the only ones who seem to have any sort of mobility, who seem to be able to find a way to get out of a particular circumstance. Even thinking about Darl’s mom: There’s a line in the novel that even as tough as the men were, the women had always been stone. That’s very truthful, particularly of Appalachian women, of rural women. The glue that’s always held all of that together, especially in the South, has always been women.

MT: I’m confused, and I expect purposely so for your part, about your main villain, Dwayne. Talk about a study in contradictions: He’s been shaped by the extreme harshness of a mountain life, but it’s clear from the Bible and other lessons he learned from his grandfather that he had a choice in directions and chose the wrong path. Yet it’s also Dwayne who comes out with the almost tender lecture about the line that holds us — those bonds of love.

DJ: When I look back at what most interested me as a writer about this novel, this is Dwayne’s story as much as it is everything else. I was interested in building a character like Lester Ballard in (Cormac) McCarthy’s “Child of God” or William Gay’s “The Paperhanger” or Flannery O’Connor’s “The Misfit.” I was very interested in trying to create a character who was memorable in that way.

One of the things that’s scariest about a bad guy is when he makes sense. There are a lot of moments when Dwayne makes perfect sense. When he’s up there with Calvin on the land that's been clear cut, he sees that as the destruction equally violent and equally horrific as murder. That’s something that I feel.

One of the other things I was playing with is the absolute danger of religion and how it can be used to justify anything — especially if you focus just Old Testament. That’s one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. Dwayne, in a lot of ways, focused in on that. When you think of that kind of vengeful, violent God, that’s something that kept Dwayne Brewer up at night.

And, I still can’t shake his voice. He had a very specific way of talking, the dialogue was very different than anything I’ve ever done.

MT: Reading a review once about Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridan,” I came across this critique: “I read it, but I’m glad it’s finished.” That reviewer was referring to the violence of that seminal novel — something that you are frequently critiqued on. For instance, just when I’d almost been able to put the image out of my mind, you had to bring up how Doug Dietz died in “The Weight of This World.” While I appreciate the nugget of tying your stories together, Darl’s crucifixion scene was already very potent. First, where do you dream up these all-too-real tortures, and second, how do answer those who say they’re too much?

DJ: It’s just something I’m interested in. A writer I’m currently interested in is Donald Ray Pollock. “The Heavenly Table” was the last novel that I just loved. A lot of it is that those are the types of stories I enjoy. I don’t know why, but they are.

You think about William Gay’s “The Paperhanger.” That story is horrifically violent. He murders this 3-year-old little kid and shoves him in a cooler and takes him home and keeps him in a freezer. But what interests me most about William Gay as a writer is that he somehow makes that palatable. He does it with language. If you look at the most poetic scenes of his writing, they are often the most violent, and somehow or another, he’s able to use language in such a way that it can force you to look at things you never wanted to look at.

As an artist and a writer, that’s something I’m very much interested in. When you get to these moments in the book, that’s what I’m trying to do. With the “The Weight of This World” it was little different. That book was very much a treatise on violence, but I wanted there to be moments where you were flat-out disgusted and wanted to turn away. And, I wanted there to be moments when you honestly cheered it on, where you wanted something bad to happen to somebody. That’s a very interesting line to think about. That’s the type of thing we witness over and over and over again.

When something horrific happens on the news first there’s a disgust but over time there’s a what do we do with it? There’s a vengeance, a justice. Where that line is drawn is a very interesting thing to think about.

MT: Although I’m going to take it out of context, you’ve responded to at least one reviewer that your novels are not for everyone. Who aren’t they for?

DJ: Lots of people. For instance, I’m friends with a whole lot of booksellers. And in my bookstore up here, City Lights in Sylva, sometimes people have carried my books to the front and said, “Are there bad words in it?” And they’ll kind of laugh and say, “There are bad words in it.” So, people like that.

People who are interested in happy endings. I have no interest in happy endings. That’s not to say I’ll never write a happy ending, I don’t know. “The Line That Held Us” probably has the happiest ending of anything I’ve written. A lot of times people want an easy escape. This isn’t an airplane read, something you pick up and breeze through and that’s that, the hero rides away in the sunset. This is not that kind of book and if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re probably not going to like it.

I’m trying to raise big questions. I’m trying to force you to take a long, hard look at people you wouldn’t look at otherwise. A lot of people don’t want that from a book, and that’s perfectly OK. For me, as a reader, I’m typically not interested in those sheer entertainment books. There’s nothing wrong with that and there’s nothing against those writers, those readers. That’s just not what I do. That idea of the violence, again … a lot of people would rather go watch “Lion King” than “Reservoir Dogs.” That’s perfectly OK, but I’d rather watch “Reservoir Dogs.”

MT: As a writer, have you made it your mission to shape the world, the issues we should be examining, through your novels?

DJ: I studied literature, not creative writing, and a lot of how I think about books is drawn from that. In literature classes you didn’t so much look at the craft as you did the questions. You read a book and discussed the big ideas of that book. From a reader’s standpoint, from a student’s standpoint, that’s where I’m coming out of. I don’t read books that don’t raise big questions. My favorite book I’ve read recently is Tommy Orange’s “There, There.” That debut novel raises huge questions. You can’t read that book and not think about a whole lot of big things.

A lot of times when people don’t get my work or enjoy my work it’s because they don’t have a willingness to ask those questions, go to those places. Again, that’s perfectly fine, but as a writer, that’s what I’m interested in. With this one, it was how far are you willing to go for the people you love most? It was an examination of religion, it was a lot of things.

I don’t set out to write books like that in the way other writers do. For instance, T. Geronimo Johnson. … I sat down with him once and we were kind of talking and he told me very specifically that when he sat down to write “Welcome to Braggsville” he knew what he wanted to write a book about. He knew what the big question was. Then it became a matter of what kind of story do I tell in order to ask this question to start this conversation. That’s not how I work as a writer. … All of those things for me work on a subconscious level. I can’t tell what the book’s about until it’s done.

MT: For the last couple of novels, you’ve begun work on the next even before the tour begins for the current novel. So I’m wondering. …

DJ: Oh yeah, I’m in the middle of a novel now. I’d like to have a draft of it done before this one comes out. I don’t know if that will happen. But, the story’s there. The characters are there.

It’s currently titled, “When These Mountains Burn.” It starts as two stories. You have a father who has a son who’s a heroin addict and then you’ve got another story of an addict. The two stories are running parallel and then they start intertwining as the tension builds.

One of the things that interested me with the book I’m working on is trying to get to that other perspective of the family, of the father. That’s been very difficult for me in that’s not the story I know. I’ve never been a part of that aftermath, that conflict. I know the story of the addict, but I don’t know the story of the addict’s mother or father. The other aspect is watching the mountains dissolve around them. You’ve got this father who is not just losing his son, he’s losing his culture.

That’s what I’m working on. I don’t know if it will come out next year (2019). Odds are that it will come out the following year. I’m under contract for two novels, so I’ll have this one and one more coming out after that.

MT: You set quite a deadline for yourself. Disciplined or simply fast?

DJ: I think about my novels for months and months (before I write them) … so, yes, there’s discipline there, but a big part of it is that I’m trying to make a living that way — and that’s difficult to do at best.