Hell at the Breech » (First Perennial Edition)

Tom Franklin is the author of Poachers: Stories and Hell at the Breech. Winner of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches in the University of Mississippi's MFA program and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, and their children, Claire and Thomas.

In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends — —mostly poor cotton farmers — form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty. Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham war are four people: the aging sheriff sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech; a ruthless detective who wages his own war against the gang; and a young store clerk who harbors a terrible secret.

Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the events of dark days that led the people involved to discover their capacity for good, evil, or for both.

USA Today

In Hell at the Breech, Franklin has cleverly woven history and fiction, using detail as a tool to shape his plot. He also makes his characters rise up from the pages as if they were there with you.

Along with breathtaking descriptions of Mitcham Beat's scenery (you can practically feel the cotton buds beneath your fingertips and smell the pine in the air), Franklin does what Harper Lee did in To Kill a Mockingbird; He lets his set of quirky characters run the story while he focuses on the repercussions of his characters' curiosity and age.

Hell at the Breech is an impressive novel that should catapult Franklin into the big leagues. — Nickolas Thomas