Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Rural Mississippi and the enigmatic kudzu of the woods.
Blackwood
What you need to know before your trail
The town of Red Bluff, Mississippi, has seen better days, though those who’ve held on have little memory of when that was. Myer, the county’s aged, sardonic lawman, still thinks it can prove itself — when confronted by a strange family of drifters, the sheriff believes that the people of Red Bluff can be accepting, rational, even good.
The opposite is true: this is a landscape of fear and ghosts — of regret and violence — transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing homes, cars, rivers, and hiding a terrible secret deeper still.
Colburn, a junkyard sculptor who’s returned to Red Bluff, knows this pain all too well, though he too is willing to hope for more when he meets and falls in love with Celia, the local bar owner. The Deep South gives these noble, broken, and driven folks the gift of human connection while bestowing upon them the crippling weight of generations. With broken histories and vagabond hearts, the townsfolk wrestle with the evil in the woods — and the wickedness that lurks in each and every one of us.
Travel Guide
Welcome to Red Bluff, Mississippi
Red Bluff (colloquially known as Mississippi’s Little Grand Canyon) is a geologic feature formed by natural erosion. Since the Red Bluff in the books is a small, crumbling and decaying town, then this is quite apt when you think about it.
This is a bleak novel about small town America. A small, remote, dying town. This is the kind of place where you don’t live, you just exist. You don’t visit; you just merely pass through.
Drifters inhabit this town. This is lush landscape in parts however as the area is covered in Kudzu vines which carpet, smother and blanket any signs of life. There are broken people here, broken lives and more besides.
Colbert is a boy in 1956 and returns to the town twenty years later. The town has offered the abandoned stores for those who will renovate and maintain the building. All free of charge.
There is evil lurking in the nearby woods and vines however – what lies hidden amongst the vines is the stuff of nightmares
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Blackwood
Destination/location: Red Bluff, Mississippi Author/guide: Michael Farris Smith Departure Time: 2000s
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