Peter Damien Bellis’s novel, set in the deep bigoted South of revival meetings, alligator hunts, Spanish moss and bible bashing lynch mobs occupies a similar fictional territory to Faulkner and Peter Mathiessen’s Shadow Country.

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If William Faulkner were alive today I'm thinking he would really dig this. Peter Damian Bellis proving the Southern Gothic novel is alive and kicking takes us on a leaky boat alligator hunt into some of the murkiest swamps of the deep south. Thaddeus Jacobs the ne'er do well adopted--then excommunicated son of a tent revivalist preacher living almost as a hermit on an abandoned island is the stuff of local legend. Many of those living in the nearest nearby locality look at him superstitiously as Lucifer in the flesh. He's spent his life surviving by thrift and guile. When Kilby and Jonas Lee--two trouble happy juvenile delinquents catch him napping with a basketful of live crabs they almost get away with them. Almost--but not quite. Broken up into narrative parts Bellis's Conjure Man (reminiscent of Faulkner's Sound and the Fury) tells its tale through the voices of the middle aged Thaddeus trying to find his peace with God and the world about him and a young Huck Finn-ish like Kilby who sees the world always with fresh and opportunistic eyes. Hoodoo and superstition--trumpet players and shape changing demons--wild alcoholic reveries and crazy faith healing orgies and at the end of the line is the biggest, meanest, nastiest alligator in creation looking to eat whatever comes within its range. The entire shebang is here pretty much of what you might expect from a Southern Gothic novel--the writing and plotting clever and witty. A very very entertaining read and one I would very much recommend. ( )

The literary world is a swamp and the writer is up on a log, and the longer he keeps his balance the more likely he is to come to see that the swamp is alive with giant alligators and maybe he made a bad idea getting up on the log. Bellis, in the Conjure Man, damn near falls off that log a couple times, and a couple times the alligator is nipping at him, making him dance on that log and keep his balance. What Bellis doesn’t seem to realize is that the biggest gator in the swamp is right under him just waiting for him to take once chance to many, try one linguistic trick to many, try one too many voices, tell one story that just bores the shit out of someone, because as soon as he does he’s going to end up in that black black swamp and that blackgreen gator going to eat him up. I reached the end of the book and looked heavenward thankee lord Bellis is still alive and that gator done got bored and went to hide under the log of a different writer.
Otherwise, the thing is I don’t like novels in dialect and I don’t like coming of age novels and this one is both and I never would have read it at all if not for various personal reasons, and luckily it was only a pain in the ass for a few pages, when I realized I was going to get my brain’s worth of creativity and lingo and fun. First off, Bellis as black man does not say gwan, he says going; second of all, stories rise up and vanish throughout unpredictably, realistically and fairytalistically; and thirdly, it was funny and smart.
But the thing is I give the book just 4 stars because throughout I had the idea that this is a writer’s first book—but not as in last book, that this is a writer testing his talents, that this writer has something giant and/or profound in him, and that book is his five star book. ( )