ABOUT THE BOOK

In small Ozark towns like West Table, Missouri, what you are is where you're born and in Venus Holler, what you are isn't much. For Bev Merridew, who can turn a trick as easily as roll a joint, life in Venus Holler is tolerable. For her 19-year-old and angry daughter, a life like Bev's isn't good enough. Jamalee Merridew with her tomato red hair and her barely suppressed rage has plans and they don't include Venus Holler or especially Bev. In fact they depend on her drop dead beautiful brother, Jason, the object of adoring libidinous attention from every West Table female. Jamalee thinks he's her ticket out. But Jason may just be the country queer and in the hills and hollows of the Ozarks that is about the most dangerous and also the most courageous thing a man could be.

Into their midst comes Sammy Barlach, a man with too many file numbers on his record who is passing through West Table on the way to nowhere, looking to be a loser in fresh surroundings. Jamalee thinks he may just be the muscle she and Jason need.

But Sammy is better at botched burglaries than security and when Jason turns up dead and the cops call it an accident even Bev is roused from her easy going acceptance of the system. Pooling their talents the misfit threesome set out to expose the solid citizens who thought it was no harm, no foul to kill a country queer.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

"...but let's agree on Woodrell as the foremost exponent of the poetry of trailer-park trash. Woodrell does the best 'country noir' prose there is, and if you want to be hip read him now..." - Susie Maguire, Southern Daily Echo

"With Tomato Red, Woodrell proves once again that he's one of the finest exponents of American noir writing. His seductive and deceptively lazy style lulls the reader into a false sense of security - and then hits him below the belt. In short, he's an original and first-rate story-teller." - Irish News

"Tomato Red is a haunting requiem for losers..." - Time Out

"Jane Austen saw far less violence in her world, but move her to South Carolina and you'll get some idea of what Daniel Woodrell is up to." - The Spectator

"Terrific." - Literary Review

"Woodrell's not widely known here, but in America his five books to date have had writers as diverse as James , Barry Gifford, James Crumley, Carl Hiaasen and E Annie Proulx clearing their throats to sing his praises. Despite its often unspeakably bleak outlook, Tomato Red is a beautiful and often very funny book, full of raw poetry, the small mean lives of people living on the bloody rim of things - 'Lives of rancid nothingness,' as Woodrell puts it - described in prose that is brilliant and original, Woodrell being better than anyone at the vernacular of desperation, revenge and redemption, with dialogue as good as anything in Elmore Leonard and a skewed unpredictability reminiscent of Harry Crews. Read it and weep." Uncut

"Daniel Woodrell is a storyteller of bristling imagination and muscular prose, who uses the poetically profane language of the trailerpark to wicked effect. Tomato Red focuses on the mean-eyed dwellers of Venus Holler, Missouri, and that township's fearsome attitudes to homosexuality. Fuelled by hard liquor and rockabilly, this novel walks off the page and into your home like a bug-eyed boondock bogeyman." - Bizarre

"At a time when the two dominant strands of male American fiction to emerge in the last couple of decades - contemporary noir and dirty realism - have largely lapsed into self-parody, a writer from the Ozark mountains of Missouri has come along to resuscitate them both. From its farcical beginning to the awful, stupid tragedy of its denouement, this is a flat-out marvellous book. Rooted in the purest noir tradition of the Fifties, it is nevertheless great literary fiction. Like a murder ballad or a prison-yard blues, Tomato Red is written in the kind of vernacular poetry you want to read and learn by heart." - John Williams, The Independent

"Tomato Red is one of the great American noir novels of the decade... a wonderfully funny and tragic tale of blighted white trash dreams, a country noir every bit as sharp and twisted as the best of Jim Thompson or Charles Williams...what Daniel Woodrell's come back with are some of the finest, toughest books in American fiction today." - John Williams, Time Out