Have You Read This? Andy Davidson's The Boatman's Daughter

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what happened to this guy

Like westerns, fantasy, and science fiction, Southern Gothic fiction uses the environment as another character. Often full of tall grasses that seem to soak up the sweltering heat, lush and massive trees where evil lurks behind and within, and murky marshlands, swimming with hidden dangers, this landscape serves as both the backdrop for the characters’ various misdeeds and its own character, as much alive as the people who plot and murder within its confines. This is the setting of Andy Davidson’s latest book The Boatman’s Daughter, a beautifully fantastic, Southern gothic tale of dark magic and darker stains upon the soul.

The protagonist Miranda Crabtree grew up in the swamps of Arkansas. After losing her father at an early age, she is adopted by a mysterious witch, earning herself an adopted brother, and soon begins working with a cast of shady characters. Miranda’s world is upended when a mysterious girl comes into the swamp. The girl has strange powers, and some bad men want her, men willing to burn down or tear through whatever gets in their way. The girl’s entry into Miranda’s life also upends everything she thought she knew about her life and her makeshift family, even as she strives to defend both.

The Southern gothic tradition boasts such luminaries as Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, and even if Andy Davidson’s writing doesn’t transcend the prose of these luminaries, he shows his love for the genre, perhaps even an innate understanding of it, through the prose he writes. The land that he writes about is as textured and thrumming with menacing as the diabolical preacher Billy Cotton and the sadistic constable Charlie Riddle. The book could take place a year ago, five years ago, and even twenty years ago, the setting so alien and separate from what we know that the intrusion from the outside world, the world beyond the swamp, is minimal. Davidson’s prose draws you into this world, as fantastical as anything Frodo walked through, but grounded in a gritty reality familiar to fans of noir and suspense. Readers will marvel at the spectacle of the world Davidson paints even as they watch their steps for water moccasins.