This Dark Road to Mercy - Wiley Cash
Easter Quillby and her little sister Ruby are orphans – sort of. Mom Corinne Quillby ODed a while back and Dad, pitcher (L) Wade Chesterfield, relinquished his parental rights long ago, so the sisters live in foster care. But Wade is back and wants his girls. He wants them because he’s just come into money, lots of it, and can finally take care of them. The problem with that is that it isn’t Wade’s money, and in fact doesn’t even belong to the guy he stole it from. That’s why Pruitt is on their trail.
Brady Weller’s on their trail, too, but unlike Pruitt, Brady’s not bad through-and-through. He’s just sort of situationally bad. Brady, an ex-cop drummed off the force for a little accident a while back, is the girls’ guardian ad litem, and he takes the “quardian” part pretty seriously. Once he figures out the score, Brady can really turn it on.
He’d better: these girls definitely need a guardian…
| The second time out of the box finds North Carolina author Wiley Cash once more talking up the plight of kids raised in a less-than-normal home. In his first novel, A Land More Kind than Home, Cash told the story of a preteen boy whose brother dies at the hands of a Pentecostal congregation after the two catch their mother in dalliance with the preacher man. For This Dark Road to Mercy, Cash switches the narrative to a pair of preteen sisters – but their lives are just as messy… |
There are definite structural similarities between Cash’s two novels: for one, both are told in three different voices, one of which is a child. This time the speakers are Easter, Pruitt and Brady; and Cash does a workmanlike job of painting three different characters – though Pruitt and Brady seem a lot more similar than one might like for villain and hero. Perhaps Brady’s more of a semi-anti-hero.
Cash sets the story against a recent historical background, the race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to eclipse Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1998. The steroid era plays a role of its own in Dark Road, with Pruitt not only a practitioner of the juice but also a purveyor. Pruitt and Wade have a dark history of their own that can also be laid at the feet of an episode of ‘roid rage. Talk about your recurring theme…
Where Cash’s first novel seemed almost like a writing exercise, his second – although shorter – seems meatier and the construction more consistent. Perhaps that is in part because this time there are no hackneyed themes (preacher gone bad, weird religion) and the voices of the characters are more true to themselves. It looks as though Wiley is growing into his considerable talent.
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