Why read Twilight?

Book cover of Twilight

Book description

Suspecting that something is amiss with their father's burial, teenager Kenneth Tyler and his sister Corrie venture to his gravesite and make a horrific discovery: their father, a whiskey bootlegger, was not actually buried in the casket they bought for him. Worse, they learn that the undertaker, Fenton Breece, has…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Twilight as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Robert Gwaltney

Author

This gothic fairytale is a favorite. Exploring the universal themes of good and evil, William Gay’s prose poetically weaves a sinister tale of Fenton Breece, an undertaker who abuses the dead.

This novel takes the reader on an eerie backwoods odyssey lush with peril and a grotesque cast of characters. I am inspired in my writing by Gay’s assignment of myth to place as he has done with the wilderness he calls the Harrikin.

From Robert's list on the gothic American South.

Lee Rozelle

Author

It’s fitting that the creepiest novel on my list begins with a wagon full of corpses and a rural graveyard pocked with exhumed caskets. William Gay’s Twilight revolves around the dreadful plots of Fenton Breece, a dapper, well-spoken mortician whose ghoulish habits will keep even the heartiest reader up at night. After witnessing the undertaker stealing a family burial vault, young Tyler and his sister Corrie discover that Breece has been mutilating the bodies of the people he buries. A blackmail plot ensues, an assassin hired. Then things get really, really bad.

From Lee's list on contemporary Southern Gothic.