NEAL BARRETT, JR. – The Hereafter Gang. Mark V. Zeisling, hardcover, 1991. Mojo Press, softcover, 1999.

   What this is, part of it anyway, is your quintessential nostalgic Texas road novel, sort of like something Dan Jenkins might write if he’d been holed up with a bottle and Thomas Wolfe for a week or two.

   It’s not for your genteel audience, you understand; hell, it may not even be for anybody who can spell genteel. Byt Joe Bob Briggs, now, he’d like it a whole lot. There’s a good bit of drinkin’ and fornicatin’, a fair amount of of drivin’, and more puredee Texas-style talk than you can shake a dead armadillo at.

   There’s this 50-odd year old guy who tells people he’s around 30 and looks it, ’cause he periodically covers himself up with good old mother earth. He just sorts of drifts along, lives a lot in the past and lets the present mostly take care of itself. His momma’s dead and his daddy used to run a lumberyard, but he’s a few boards shy of a stack now and in one of those homes.

   Well, our hero’s wife Earlene dumps him for one of those TV preachers with a lot of hair just ’fore he was fixin’ to leave her, so he gets stoned, walks off his advertisin’ job, hooks up with this underage carhop named Sue Jean, and they take off in a stolen Nazi car, and … aw, hell, you don’t need to know any more about the plot.

   It’s about Life, is what it is, and Death, and a bunch of other stuff, and it’s probably not quite like anything you read before. You’ll know after 20 pages if you’re gonna like it or not, and if you do, you’re gonna like it a lot.

   Y’see, Barrett’s got himself one of those really unique voices. Billy Clyde Crider put me onto it, and it’s a dandy. Now if you can’t trust me and old Billy Clyde, who can you trust?