An engrossing and tragic literary thriller that evokes the sinister
realism of Cormac McCarthy and the inescapable family bonds of Daniel
Woodrell, The Marble Orchard tells the story of Beam, the black sheep
of the Sheetmire family, a large and entrenched rural Kentucky clan.
Beam finds himself on the run after killing a man who was trying to rob
him, a man who turns out to be the son of Loat Duncan, a powerful local
businessman and cold-blooded killer.
With Loat--who is hiding a devastating secret about Beam's past--and
Elvis, the local sheriff, hot on his trail, Beam leads a nomadic
existence as he descends deeper into his own heart of darkness, slipping
from one place to the next, each more mysterious than the last. The
people he meets during his journey--an enigmatic trucker dressed in a
suit, a cemetery-dwelling Good Samaritan, an armless brothel owner--are
pieces of a puzzle that hold the key to Beam's past, as well as his
possible future salvation.
Alex Taylor holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and has
taught creative writing at Western Kentucky University and McNeese State
University. His debut collection, The Name of the Nearest River, was
published to great critical acclaim in 2010. Taylor has received the
Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing, the Barry
Hannah Prize for Fiction, and the Eric Hoffer Award in General Fiction.
His stories have appeared in the Oxford American, Black Warrior
Review, Carolina Quarterly, American Short Fiction, the Greensboro
Review, and elsewhere. He hails from Rosine, Kentucky.
