Welcome to the Fallen Paradise

Rating:
Summary: Welcome to the Fallen Paradise
Review: Dayne Sherman has spun a classic tale of the extent evil men will go over a small plot of land. Land is at the heart of a lot of conflict in the South. Sherman captured this. His setting, Baxter Parish, and the characters are real and frightening. It kept me guessing how far Cotton Moxley would go to drive his new neighbor off the land. I was also faced with how far would I go if someone was trying to drive me from my home. Days after I read the book, I still couldn't get it off my mind. A great read.

Rating:
Summary: Fall into the paradise of great writing
Review: I could not stop reading "Welcome to the Fallen Paradise," so I was sent to the couch (the light bothers my husband). At four-thirty this morning I finished the book and was left feeling as though I had fallen into paradise. The paradise of Dayne Sherman's brillant writing. I fell hard, into Louisiana's Baxter Parish; smack in the middle of Jesse Tadlock's terrifying troubles, his till-death-do-us-part family, and his worried but beautiful heart.

All Jesse wants to do is get a job, rekindle his love for his high school sweetheart, and buy some land and a house. But his psychopathic neighbor, Cotton Moxley, only wants Jesse dead. The feud between Moxley and the Tadlock family is rabid, electrifying, and deadly.

I highly recommend buying "Welcome to the Fallen Paradise," and then staying up all night to read it. It is well worth a night on the couch.



Rating:
Summary: To be Southern or not to be Southern
Review: Jesse Tadlock must leave highschool for the army. Ringing foul in his ears is the sentiment that these would be the best days of his life. Big for his age --man size-- Jesse helps his kin to dig his cousins grave because there is no money to pay for such a luxury.

At the outset, there is no part of his life untouched by violence except in the love of his highschool sweetheart and the nurturing of the women of his family.

When Jesse returns home to Baxter Parish after the recent death of his Mother, he has a job lined up with the Sheriff, a new home bought with the money from his mothers life insurance --pretty much all that is left to herald the passage of his Mother's hard life, and real hope of rekindling his romance with his highschool girl, the only woman he has truly loved. It seems he is off to a good start and may have the peaceful existence he craves.

Then we get a taste of "Cotton" who will not relinquish his hold over the house and property Jesse buys though it has been taken by the bank. Then "Cotton" tells Jesse to leave or else and just how long he has to go.

Things get interesting after that. A lot has been said in the other reviews about the land and that tie that binds. It is integral, but more central is the dogged will of Jesse and his male family members. They make pitt bulls look like kitty cats.

The author has drawn his characters well, and crafted a fine story. I could say a lot more about this book. It has a lot of subtle nuances that could get overlooked in all the excitement.
Chiefly of interest to me is the incident that causes Jesse to leave highschool and join the army and the two things that send him after "Cotton" on his own turf. There's some irony there. This book does get inside your head. --NO doubt about that.

Rating:
Summary: The heart of darkness
Review: Sherman speaks with a distinctive voice in a fiction genre that deals with the dark underbelly of life as it is really lived beneath the veneer of civilization.

Returning home after a 12-year stint in the Army, Jesse Tadlock is looking for a place to settle. His mother recently died, and, although she possessed little in the way of material goods, she did leave her son a $30,000. life insurance policy the government couldn't touch. With a new job waiting in the Sheriff's Department of a nearby parish, Jesse is ready to begin the next phase of his life, purchasing a small parcel of land in Mount Olive. He scrubs the small house on the property, pleasantly anxious to begin his new job the following day. Everything changes in the morning, when Jesse is confronted by the wild-eyed Cotton Moxley, who informs the new owner he has 72 hours to get off the land. This is no idle threat.

Jesse values two things above all: God and family. After a trip to the local church, Jesse retreats to his kin, who have a long history of things done in the name of family, violent and otherwise. Chief among the men is Uncle Red, a surrogate father to Jesse, since his father was killed in Vietnam when the boy was only three-years old. Uncle Red is a seasoned veteran of hardscrabble survival, a source of comfort and direction for Jesse, who is overwhelmed by the implications of what awaits him in the person of Cotton Moxley. Moxley is both feared and hated throughout the state, but also a man with far-reaching influence.

After Jesse loses his promised job with the Sheriff's department, no doubt because of Moxley's connections, continually harassed and threatened by Moxley, he realizes that the law can do nothing to protect his interests. Time turns back on itself as the Tadlock's find themselves returning to the bloody ways of the past, when men fought to protect their own and the law turned a blind eye, depending on the body count. Toughened by experience, Uncle Red knows people who can provide ammunition and information, while the Tadlocks prepare to battle a crazy man who has threatened their family and peace of mind.

This is Tim Gatreaux and Tom Franklin country, two writers who have portrayed southern justice and the mindset that cannot and will not back down when honor is at stake. Speaking in the first person, Sherman's Jesse Tadlock steps into an unpredictable situation, a little unsure but learning as he goes, sparked by the outrage of the underdog. This isn't urban America, but the dark, deep heart of violence that lurks wherever men are willing to die over a disputed piece of land. Before it's over, blood will be shed. It's just a question of whose blood it will be. Luan Gaines/2004.


Rating:
Summary: The Rural South in Which I Grew Up
Review: Somehow a reader's copy of this book (uncorrected galley proof) was in the postage pile at my localbookstore. I asked Heather, the redheaded owner of the store, if I could have it (I used to work there part-time). The novel looked Gothic and Southern. The first sentence was exquisite: "The sky was bold,
the sun angry."

For three hours after arriving home to my house I read this book. I did not go to the bathroom. I did not drink my usual coffee. I just read until dark. It read fast, real fast. This book is arguably the best piece of writing I've read since the complete stories of Flannery O'Connor. I was overcome by the battle between Jesse Tadlock and Cotton Moxley.

Here's what's really striking about this book; this is the South Louisiana in which I grew up. It's NOT the genteel, idyllic paradise portrayed in films like Steel Magnolias. It's not all Southern Belles and Southern Gentleman. There is a side of life here that is amoral, and problems are solved through violence. The South is well known for its history of racial violence. But few authors have dealt with Southern violence that is not racial or domestic, and seems to have no clear meaning. Dayne does a fantastic job here.

Who is Dayne Sherman, anyway? I don't know. The
galley proof says he's from Louisiana. The story is outstanding, though. I'll give you that much.



Rating:
Summary: An Appreciation of Welcome to the Fallen Paradise
Review: Welcome To The Fallen Paradise by Dayne Sherman is a very good read indeed. It can be experienced on one level simply as a whopping good adventure yarn, and many will see it as little more than that, rather like the James Bond stories of Ian Flemming. Certainly it reads with the same page turning interest and bouncy adventurous charm. It is so well plotted and punctuated with regularly spaced climax that there is much temptation on the part of the casual reader to dig no deeper, and fail to see the book for the rather greater work that it really is. It is that deeper meaning that will be examined in this short note.
Other reviewers have outlined the general story progress and (unwilling to spoil the fun) I will not repeat that line of comment, except to say that the book deals with the return from the army of Jessie Tadlock to his home Parish in Southeastern Louisiana. He seeks to set himself up as a peace-loving householder with a beagle inherited from his late Mom. And almost immediately things go horribly wrong. He is mauled over by any number of persons, institutions and power structures, all of whom seem to be hell bent on keeping his naïve innocence from settling in. The book is a study in an almost baroque conflict between multiple power structures as he tries to pick his way through a picaresque path of multiple perils involving (among others) malign religious institutions, uncertain family loyalties, a dangerous law enforcement regime, and an utterly evil antagonist. This sonuvabitch, an unappetising item named Cotton Moxley, who leads Jessie's opposition is one of the most pernicious villains to creep into anglophone fiction since Richard III or Sauron of Mordor. By the time the final climax arrives, the story has built to a truly hypnotic description of "a hundred fighting monkeys in a barrel of darkness." In short, we have a tour between the boards of this book that illustrates why they don't call Jessie's home ground "Bloody Baxter Parish" for nothing.
What elevates this two hundred and forty four page novel from being simply another good adventure story, is not only the superb diction of the storyteller, but the clinical dissection of the local anthropology in which (on looking back) we realize that the evil emanating from one depraved nucleus, manages to infect the whole society and particularly the social structures that are supposed to make life worth living in a modern world. But it does take some serious looking back after the adventure part of the read to see the grander scheme at work. You may have to read it twice, a good reason to buy it in hardcover - while the copies last in the first edition. For I promise you the voice of Dayne Sherman will be with the literary chorus for a very long time indeed, and not only will you want to be among his early readers, you will want a first ed on your shelf.