EDEN

A young girl is sent to nurse her dying aunt in this arresting, uncompromising debut. Fourteen-year-old Maddy Dangerfield lives with her parents in rural Mississippi: her mother, Faye, obese and devoutly religious, is "a maid for damn near every white man in Pyke County"; her alcoholic, illiterate father, Chevrolet, works in a scrap yard and spends the family's money on whores and gambling. One of his sexual conquests was Faye's sister, Pip, who is estranged from the family as a result. To teach Maddy about mortality (and to assuage her own conscience), Faye sends Maddy to Pip's home on weekends to help care for her as she succumbs to breast cancer. What makes the book stand out is not its relatively simple plot, but Vernon's idiosyncratic prose style ("he laughed and folded his arms as if he controlled my vocabulary") and Maddy's stark, often surreal perception of the world. Her burgeoning sexuality is illustrated less by her crush on young laborer Landy Collins than by the way she describes the tangled mess of smells and sensations that define the people around her, who are "all, in some way, falling apart." The tone is relentlessly grim, infused with religious superstition, racism and death; macabre events—Chevrolet's mutilation at the hands of his mother-in-law, the death of a troubled orphan, the slaughtering of a hog—are scattered like land mines throughout. But what Vernon's story lacks in optimism, it more than makes up for with raw power and insight. Agent, Amy Williams, ICM.(Jan.)