The Gone Dead

Anticipointment.

That's a dumb word we use in TV news sometimes when a promo for a story gets you excited, then the story itself lets you down.

This book had a lot of promise, but not a lot of payoff.

I've read a lot of southern literature lately. Something feels good about books set in the deep south. I like the setting as character and there are a lot of incredible authors in the genre right now. So, I gravitated towards this book.

In it, a woman returns to the Mississippi Delta decades after her father's death. She hasn't been back since, but she inherited his old house and decides it's time to return, however briefly, to prepare the house for sale and maybe solve the mystery of  her father's death.

An up and coming black poet, Cliff was found dead in his yard in what the police declared as an accident or maybe even a suicide. Cliff's family and his daughter Billie never quite believed it and, given the racism of the 1970s when he died, she had good reason to doubt the official story. As she talks to people who knew her dad and meets up with a scholar who has written about his life, she also learns for the first time that she had gone missing the hours after her father's death. Why had no one mentioned it? Where did she go? And, who was covering it up now?

Are you anticipating? I was too. Then, I found myself anticipating and anticipating and never quite receiving the payout.

It's not that the story is not interesting. It is. But, it just takes too long to get to the good stuff. And, when it does, it follows the most obvious track.

I was anticipointed... And, wish I would have bailed out halfway through.