The Slackums own Perdition County and the range of saw-tooth mountains that stand like broken glass bowls surrounding the river-littered valley below. They are criminals who rule from their place atop the hill at the end of a dead-end road that only the worst ever get a chance to see. There, That Violent Country takes place in the late 1970s at a time where there’s a new scourge, methamphetamine, that’s changing the landscape of everything they had known before.
Vietnam veteran and prodigal son Ulysses Bloodwood promised he would never come back to Butchersfield but drawn home for his mother’s wake he arrives to find his older brother, Whelan, dead-nuts in the Slackums’ crosshairs. It’s up to the younger Bloodwood — as it always has been — to save his older brother and his family at all costs.
Dealing with his own past — the flooded memories of his time in the war that have crippled him and his poisoning by Agent Orange — he sets out to seek redemption that may be found in the wild timber he grew up in, but it has changed during his time away into something savage, more resembling the war he fought over seas than the small mountain life in which he was raised up. Along the way he may even allow himself to love again. A girl he left behind, Joelle Cambeul, has been waiting for something or someone with a keen awareness that her time on the mountain may be running out and is seeking salvation and redemption of her own.
Thematically this story is a displaced southern gothic picaresque that holds within its boundaries love, betrayal, the wartime razor wire that ties families together, brutal revenge, and man’s search for his place in the world.
With a cast of characters that includes a sociopathic killer, an unhinged apostle of the Lord that both crucifies and baptizes folks with the ardent zeal that only those of great belief can muster, a wood witch surrounded by meat trees who still practices the old ways of her folk, and a bi-eyed second generation lawman who will pay any price to claim the mountain as his own, the opportunity for redemption lies atop the cold winter’s mountain, snow set ablaze by clan war and desire.
Against the quilt of the dying 1970s and the beginning of the amphetamine epidemic where the hard-scrabble people of the northwest prospered or died, we find at the heart of this tale family, decency alongside deception, and ruin. Herein seething hate and blistering love meet at a dark crossing where damnation’s heart beats somewhere in the night on a mountaintop alight with fire, lighting the path to the obscure depths of the human heart.