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I finished reading Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline this week. Back in April, I came across a review by Francine Prose of it and Carl Hiassen’s latest beach read. I pre-ordered Bloodline as soon as I finished the review, and although it took me a couple of months to get through it, because other things ate into my reading time, it was about as good as I hoped. In fact, I’m now thinking I need to pick up his first book, 2017’s Nitro Mountain.
Bloodline is the story of Winston Alcorn, his sons Dustin and James, his wife Mandy, and the people they interact with in a small, gritty corner of Tennessee. In the book’s first chapter, Alcorn convinces a woman, Miss Becka, to give him a job at the dying sawmill she owns. No sooner is he on the shop floor than he chops off his right hand, using the resultant court case to take ownership of the property, which he quickly (the novel jumps forward several years) turns into a chaotic open-air flea market and auction site. Things escalate until Alcorn is floating up and down the local river on a refurbished ferry, broadcasting his own right-wing talk radio program and campaigning for the state legislature, his key issue the defense of a local Confederate statue set for removal. Miss Becka, living in her falling-down family home and tending bar in a nearby dive, watches it all happen, seething.
Winston, who changes his name to Wins-a-ton in a surprisingly successful bid for folk-hero status, is a somewhat despotic, glowering figure, constantly pitting those around him against each other. The effect on his sons is particularly painful; each runs away, and is inexorably drawn back. But the women who exist in his orbit, barely able to hold his attention, have ideas of their own.
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Plotwise, the book is like a cross between A Face In The Crowd and one of the grimier works of Harry Crews, like A Feast Of Snakes or The Mulching Of America. Wins-a-ton is all too believable, a cunning, amoral idiot with an eye for an angle and an outsized sense of his own importance in the world. And each of his sons bears the same curse, in a way; each believes in a dream version of themselves, and either injures themselves in pursuit of it or grows bitter from seeing just how out of reach it is. Some of the best, hardest-hitting writing in Bloodline comes when younger brother James moves out and tries to get a job and just be a person in the world, only to be confronted with cold-eyed exploitation. Wins-a-ton’s two henchmen are more pitiable figures, hapless and only occasionally useful to their ungrateful lord.
The female characters, though, aren’t dreamers. They’re pragmatists, making the best of their respective situations and taking what’s take-able when an opportunity comes. Mandy and Miss Becka, separately and together, not only push the story to its somewhat inevitable (and well-handled) conclusion, but provide an alternate way of looking at, and dealing with, the blasted moral universe Johnson has set up.
Bloodline doesn’t turn its characters into hicksploitation cartoons for the amusement of jaded urbanites, but neither does it portray them as irredeemable monsters. (Honestly, if the book has a flaw, its that Wins-a-ton isn’t grotesque or larger-than-life enough; at times he’s less an antagonist than a looming darkness. But any child who’s ever cowered in real fear of a father’s anger will recognize that.)
Bloodline is literary fiction that doesn’t suck. Buy it.
Did you know there’s a documentary about Leo Records and its founder, Leo Feigin? Leo Records: Strictly For Our Friends was completed in 2024 and has played the odd festival, but is still seeking distribution. It looks really good to me, and I’d love to watch it if it ever pops up on a streaming service.
This is your reminder that Burning Ambulance is currently working with Leo to put the Leo Records catalog up on Bandcamp. There are over 400 titles available now, with more coming every month. Dive in — there is so much to hear.
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