Sailing to Alluvium

Book excerpt: John Pritchard's novels Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues have been dubbed "hilariously tasteless" and "not for the squeamish or pure of heart"—and equally praised by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and lovers of Southern fiction everywhere. In Sailing to Alluvium, the third installment of Pritchard's "Junior Ray Saga," irrepressible ex-deputy sheriff Junior Ray Loveblood and his sidekick Voyd Mudd have become "diktectives" to stop the murderous activities of a semi-secret, lethal organization of Southern women, the AUNTY BELLES, headed by Miss Attica Rummage. Sailing to Alluvium is another brilliant tale of the bumbling duo, with an unforgettable cast of characters deeply rooted in the Mississippi Delta, a place both real and imaginary. The novel, hilarious and moving, revolves around obsessions, underneath which lies the dark history of a class conflict that exists in the Deep South, not among black and white but between the white "haves" and the white "have-nots." John Pritchard's work fits well between the singing prose of James Agee and the rustic lampoon and high humor of Erskine Caldwell. The reader is treated to a unique brand of dark comedy that closes the divide between burlesque and metaphysics, fuses the profane with the sublime, and explains the Deep South as no other writer has done.