Hub City Press

264 pages, $26.00

Review by Denton Loving

            Jon Sealy’s debut novel, The Whiskey Baron, begins with the not-very-mysterious deaths of two young men outside a known whiskey mill in Prohibition-era South Carolina.  These men have both been shot down in the middle of the night, their bodies left in the street.  What follows is not a mystery of who committed the crime as much as a beautiful and brilliant exploration of a Carolina mill town—intricately bound in violence and vice—unravelling at its core.

Center stage in this story is a man named Mary Jane Hopewell, accused of the murders but known better as a drunk.  Mary Jane is injured himself, barely escaping the first gun fight and then disappearing from Sealy’s fictional Castle County.  Two men are looking for Mary Jane, each desperate to find him first.  One is Furman Chambers, Castle County’s aging sheriff.  The other is Larthan Tull, the man whose liquor supplies a powerful bootleg distributor for the entire Southern region.  The different paths of these two men are emphasized by their similarities, and much of the essence of the novel is revealed in their conversations with each other:

“You never know what kind of violence the human beast is capable of, Furman, once he sees through the illusion of free will.”

“Free will.”

“We’re all locked on a stage here.  You’ve got a job to do.  I’ve got a job to do.  Mary Jane’s job was to get drunk.  As long as we play our parts, everything runs along smoothly.  The show goes on.  It’s only when the curtain is pulled back and we see the scaffolding and the strings that we realize something is amiss.  And then, who knows?” Continue reading →