Highway 28 West by Joe Taylor: A Book Review
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TO PURCHASE: HIGHWAY 28
Holy cow! What has Joe Taylor wrought upon the world now? A preacher who isn’t a preacher who is named “Preacher” whose pulpit is a picnic table. A farting lout, stinking of alcohol, rank with the stench of lust. And Death, death at every turn, death to the young and to the old, dust to dust, maggots, funerals, and finally the lesson is if you want a friend, get a dog. What a cast of characters! These are the people we grew up with, that is if you are from the Deep South–the people living in single wide trailers, driving tow trucks, pistols tucked in their belts, rifles in the back window of their pickup trucks, working the graveyard shift, in more ways than one. But watch out, here the dead will talk to you, but first they will hang themselves and then lecture you from the land of the dead. What weirdness, no plot, a teenage poet with the wisdom of the sages, the wisdom of the ages, that knows only that they know nothing and saying it in rhyme. It’s like Heraclitus reborn on the gulf coast as a damn redneck who writes like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Is it a play, or a novel, or a script for the reality that is right in front of our eyes? The bastard children of time on parade. –Review by J.M. (Michael) White
ABOUT JOE TAYLOR: Joe Taylor is the author of several story collections and eight novels, most recently Silent Bob from Nat1 Book, LLC. He has three novels coming out in the next year or so, Persephone’s Escalator from Sley House (who published his fantasy novel Bad Form), Eric and the Anti-Tankers plus Don’t Be Lonely, Lone Ranger, both from Nat 1 Book, LLC. He has two comic novels in verse, Pineapple and Back to the Wine Jug, from Sagging Meniscus Press. He has been the director of Livingston Press at The University of West Alabama…forever!
About the Reviewer: J.M. (Michael) White is a due paying member of the underground, he is a literary outlaw who is hardheaded, incorrigible, contentious, cantankerous, and contrary. He is guilty of everything, a patently anti-authoritarian, anti-religious, anti-establishment immoralist. He did graduate study in Phenomenology at Duquesne University and holds an M.A. in philosophy from Vanderbilt. His poems, interviews, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Sewanee Review, Parabola, Janus Head and The Mirror as well as in magazines and journals in Canada, England, Romania, Italy, Japan, and India. He has thirteen books in print and has compiled and edited two books: Safe in Heaven Dead: Interviews with Jack Kerouac and Opening to Our Primordial Nature by Khenchen Palden Sherab Rinpoche. He is currently hiding out on the back roads of rural Tennessee.