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Rating: 
Summary: AN AFFECTIONATE LAMPOON OF FOIBLES AND SPOOFS
Review: Clyde Edgerton is a first-rate story teller. With well honed wit at the ready he lampoons foibles and spoofs the self-righteous. All of this is done with affection and bemused understanding. In Raney, his debut novel, Mr. Edgerton displayed a remarkable ability to capture the Southern voice. He continues to do so, much to the delight of his ever growing readership. Where Trouble Sleeps , Mr. Edgerton's seventh story, returns to Listre, a fictional name for the author's hometown. Inhabited by unforgettable eccentrics, Listre is a North Carolina bump in the road recently bisected by a blinking red and yellow light. The eccentrics come with Edgerton territory; the light is the result of a mule-truck head-on. With Wednesday evening church meetings and 25 cent Friday night movies, Listre, in 1950, is viewed by its fundamental Baptist citizens as a good place to settle. Their spiritual guide is Preacher Crenshaw, a staunch believer who is sorely tested. First, his young son, Paul, is tempted by the devil. The boy "has misused his sex....in ways that do not respect his body." A pious yet practical man, Preacher Crenshaw leads Paul in prayers of repentance, then orders, "Now son, stand up, pull down your pants and turn around." Next, his devout secretary, Mrs. Claude T. Clark, who has sprained her ankle, takes up residence in the church office, where she over medicates, thanks God for all His blessings, including the Milky Way, and is visited by Jesus, who needs a little money for "a fruit pie and Pepsi." These vexations are nothing compared to the specter of lust aroused in Preacher Crenshaw by teenaged Cheryl Daniels. When he prays for release from this temptation, an unresponsive deity does not shake his faith: "He'd not felt an answer from God in the middle of the night, but he expected one the next morning." Listre is a God-fearing town and prayer will prevail. This crossroads community is seen differently by Jack Umstead who arrives in a stolen Buick Eight. To him, "Whole place looked settled, ripe, timid, kind of stupid. Just right." Deciding to stay for a few days, Jack begins to ingratiate himself with the townspeople, hoping to discover where money might be hidden. Sitting on a bench outside the gas station called "Train's Place," Jack hears of the Blaine sisters, proprietors of a chicken and ice store. Frightened by thunder storms, the aging spinsters flee their store during heavy rains to seek safety with their married sister. That's an ideal set-up for this mustachioed conman. As he waits for dark clouds to gather, Jack becomes acquainted with others. He seduces the naive Cheryl, and is attracted to Alease Toomey, 6-year-old Stephen's mother. At her house, in addition to the asthmatic spoiled Stephen, he finds drunk Uncle Raleigh, a World War I veteran, who tears a medicine chest off the wall while battling a bath. Mr. Edgerton's smooth segues from one narrator to another enrich his story's tapestry. He not only echoes their voices, he inhabits their minds and hearts. There is Mrs. Toomey taking her son and his friend to see the electric chair "so you all can see what will happen if you ever let the Devil lead you into a bad sin." Without seeing the chair with straps on its arms, young Stephen already has things pretty well figured out - after all, his mother reads to him every night from "Aunt Margaret's Bible Stories." There are more colorful characters who could only spring full-blown from the mind of this greatly gifted author. Mr. Edgerton couples their voices with his considerable narrative skills as he builds to a tragicomic denouement. He has a musician's ear, an artist's eye, and a generous heart. Clyde Edgerton is quite simply superb.
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Summary: Listre Feels Like Home
Review: Clyde Edgerton, author of the homey, feel-good novels "Raney" and one of my all-time favorites "Walking Across Egypt" has penned another sweet story set in the North Carolina town of Listre. It is the early 1950's, when towns still had one blinker light, one gas station and a general store, and were peopled with religious yet often hypocritical citizens. Into this setting comes Jack Umstead, driving up with a stolen Buick 8, an alias, and a well rehearsed plan on how to fleece the good people of Listre. But Jack doesn't count on the resolve of the folks he meets, or the spunk of one old gal with a nasty looking shotgun and a good aim. "Trouble" took a little while to lure me in. My liking for the folks of Listre grew slowly, but when it hit I was hooked - I was thoroughly engrossed in their lives and situations. Like the slow pace of life in that long-ago southern town, this novel took its time but eventually won my heart.
Rating:
Summary: Listre Feels Like Home
Review: Clyde Edgerton, author of the homey, feel-good novels "Raney" and one of my all-time favorites "Walking Across Egypt" has penned another sweet story set in the North Carolina town of Listre. It is the early 1950's, when towns still had one blinker light, one gas station and a general store, and were peopled with religious yet often hypocritical citizens. Into this setting comes Jack Umstead, driving up with a stolen Buick 8, an alias, and a well rehearsed plan on how to fleece the good people of Listre. But Jack doesn't count on the resolve of the folks he meets, or the spunk of one old gal with a nasty looking shotgun and a good aim. "Trouble" took a little while to lure me in. My liking for the folks of Listre grew slowly, but when it hit I was hooked - I was thoroughly engrossed in their lives and situations. Like the slow pace of life in that long-ago southern town, this novel took its time but eventually won my heart.
Rating: 
Summary: Very disappointing!
Review: I am a huge Clyde Edgerton fan, and I'm sorry to say I was VERY disappointed with this book. It just never seemed to get off the ground. I was expecting the type of story that I fell in love with in *Raney* and *Walking Across Egypt* (both of which left me in tears, I laughed so hard). If you're looking for Listre, you're not going to find it in this book Oh well, I guess I'll wait on his next one...
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Summary: An excellent novel!
Review: I was thoroughly disappointed with Clyde Edgerton's newest novel. Edgerton fails to create memorable and true-to-life characters as he usually does; I had trouble keeping names straight in the book, and I never felt as if I knew any of them. "Where Trouble Sleeps" is uncharacteristically vulgar and crude for a work by Edgerton. Frequent profanity and allusions to masturbation that have nothing to do with the plot are things one would expect from a mainstream novelist, not from a highly esteemed Southern author like Clyde Edgerton. Has he sold out to the rest of America and kissed the true South goodbye? Only his next novel will tell.
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Summary: Where Trouble Sleeps is a wonderful book!
Review: Of all of Edgerton's novels I've read so far, this was my least favorite, although there are portions that entertained me. In small town Listre in the 50's, 7 year old Stephen's life is unremarkable except for occasional oddities, such as his mother taking him and a friend to see the electric chair (for a deterrent) and the arrival of the mysterious "gypsy man," Delbert Jones (re name: Jack Umbaugh) whose slealth gets him into town but can't get him out. Edgerton's live reading from this book was the most entertaining author reading I have been lucky enough to attend--he read in character, played the banjo, and made the scenes he presented come to life. I was a bit disappointed that the whole novel didn't live up to the promise of the portions he shared aloud. For a better sample of his work, read Walking Across Egypt, Raney, and The Floatplane Notebooks.
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Summary: No Trouble To Enjoy This Book
Review: This is a slim little novel that can be read in no time at all, but Clyde Edgerton's Where Trouble Sleeps is big-time enjoyable. Skeptics might note three strikes against this story: 1--it's set in the 1950's; 2--it takes place in a one-blinker-light town; 3--its characters are Southern to the core. Here's how Edgerton disarms these doubter's objections: 1--there's not a hint of nostalgia in his 1950's; 2--fascinating stuff happens in his little town, and 3--he writes dialog that sticks in your mind like kudzu on a pine tree. Readers who accidentally stumble upon this book have a treat in store because there are six previous books by Edgerton to enjoy.
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Summary: A good book, but it could use more Trouble and more trouble.
Review: This is another boonie dog book review from Wolfie and Kansas. The title of Clyde Edgerton's novel, "Where Trouble Sleeps", is a pun on a dog's name. The dog, Trouble, stays at a gas station at the main crossroads in a small, 1950's North Carolina town. The humans there predict the weather based on whether Trouble sleeps inside or outside. There is also trouble sleeping in the town's only motel, as a mysterious and malevolent stranger, Jack Umstead, decides to stay over a spell while passing through on his way north. With a dog's name in the title and a small town Southern locale, we were expecting canicentric literature like Brad Watson's "Last Days of the Dog-Men". However, Trouble makes only brief appearances. The trouble, meanwhile, never reaches "Cape Fear" levels. Umstead is a somewhat bumbling con man, and not a menacing figure like Mitchum or DeNiro. "Where Trouble Sleeps" is very well written. The two maps in the book, taken together, tell a story and prove that two pictures are worth two thousand words. While this book will doubtlessly please many readers, it just had too little Trouble and too little trouble to fully satisfy our boonie dog taste.
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Summary: Entertaining, but
Review: What was the purpose of the story? It kept me entertained on a flight to the UK, but if the in flight entertainment system had been working, I'm not sure if I would have finished it. The version I read had questions for discussion which I found interesting, unfortunately, my book club was unable to find any meaningful answers to the questions raised. Throughout the book he wrote little blurbs about characters living in the town or near by. You expect them to have some relevance to the story, but they are never heard from again. It's almost as if these blurbs were put in to meet a page quota. I'm not usually a book snob, but I would turn my nose up at this one.
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Summary: No Trouble To Enjoy This Book
Review: Where Trouble Sleeps carries on the wonderful southernness of Walking Across Egypt and Raney. He has the ability to create female characters better than any other male author living. I had to laugh when little Stephen Toomey was running the southern Baptist litany of deadly sins through his young, unquestioning mind. There are so many thoughtful dichotomies and ironies, yet, I chose to read this book at face value--which is funny, funny, funny. Mr. Edgerton must have been sitting in on some of my family's reunions.
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