A World Made of Fire — Mark Childress

“A damned fine story. . . As different voices add their information about the book’s most important event, the Christmas night fire in the Bates house . . . we realize that Childress is working in a time-honored framework: that of the Southern Gothic . . . .A mystery with supernatural undertones. . . Childress has brought his story off with power and good ability. There is more here than story, however. This baby resonates.” – Stephen KingA TRULY OUTSTANDING BOOK ...Childress has the true novelist's ability to commit himself entirely to the people and events he envisions. – James Dickey Mark Childress's new-fashioned saga is full of delicate electricity and raw power. Hooray for a new talent, not just Southern, but way down deep in the soul of things. – Barry Hannah Mark Childress is a young novelist who has written a memorable story out of the land and people of the Deep South. . .The ever-present undercurrent of mystical events will probably startle many readers by arousing and bringing forth unfamiliar emotions.... A novel of considerable merit. – Erskine Caldwell A World Made of Fire is earthy, adroit, moving – an excellent novel by a writer of great promise and talent. – Jesse Hill Ford Spellbinding ... Enthralling ... An impressive debut ... A writer of poetic acuity, he evokes the atmosphere of a small Southern town in the early 1990s and brings its inhabitants to life through their colorful, softly cadenced speech. . . . Childress's remarkable command of language – he uses imagery with sensuous skill – his sure sense of plot, fueled by mysticism and mystery, and most of all, his beautifully nuanced depiction of coming of age, will keep readers enthralled. – Publishers Weekly Seldom has dialect been handled so gracefully, so respectfully. Even if you've never been to Alabama, you'll swear that the author has a perfect ear for the local speech. . . . Childress dishes up all the rainy funerals and poverty, all the bonfires and hints of incest we could want. But because each of the lurid elements serves another, more sober purpose – the study of individuals hammered by unrelenting stress – as readers we find our minds are challenged even as we revel in a lollapalooza of a story. – San Francisco Chronicle Startlingly original ... Not only do a great many marvelous things happen, they do so in a time and place so untapped that Childress is able to claim the territory as his alone.... Childress, who comes from Monroeville, Alabama, the home of Truman Capote and Harper Lee, has marked himself at the tender age of twenty-six as a major new fictional voice. – Saturday Review