The Hungry and the Lost

New fiction from Bethany W. Pope - an LBA-winning author, and a finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom Awards. They were named by the Huffington Post as 'one of the five Expat poets to watch in 2016'. Nicholas Lezard, writing for The Guardian, described their latest poetry collection, Silage, as 'literature as salvation'. Edwardian Florida. The swamplands of Tampa provide a tough but good living for those men hardy enough to brave the weather and the wildness. There are ripe pickings to be had in bird hunting; egret feathers plucked by the sack-full and sent away to adorn rich city-women's hats. Wives for these rough hunters are ordered from catalogues, attractiveness graded by cooking skills and hip-width. When illness sweeps the area and the local minister dies, his widow, his beloved Rose, succumbs to madness. His daughter Joy must struggle to keep them both alive in what has become a skeleton town, rotting into the swamp and abandoned by all but the most ruthless. Rich with visceral imagery, The Hungry and the Lost is a novel in true Southern Gothic style, pitting the worlds of myth and innocence against the rational grip of progress and modernity. -- Publisher: Parthian Books
Set in the Florida swamplands of the 1910s, The Hungry and the Lost is a lavish, brooding novel in the Southern Gothic tradition of authors like Carson McCullers or Anne Rice. While it has become a cliché to say that a novel’s location is a character, it feels unavoidable here. The swamp does far more than provide a visceral Gothic backdrop (which it does, in grand southern style), it is also an active participant – a shape-shifting antagonist-protagonist. It is its abundance that has brought the settlers here to hunt down the egret, whose beautiful plumage is in demand by wealthy northerners who use the feathers to decorate their hats. Yet as Coleridge’s unfortunate ancient mariner discovered, you upset the balance of nature at your peril, as the swamp avenges those who have hurt it. With the egrets now hunted to near extinction, along with the panthers, gators and manatees before them, all that remains are ‘clouds of mosquitoes, and the odd, water-logged cow’, and a few dogged inhabitants who try to scratch out a living by hunting beavers for fur. (When will they ever learn?) When David, a parson, and his wife Rose arrive there, the town has become a ‘skeleton’ that lies alongside ‘what could be called a river’. Following the arrival of Joy, their much-loved daughter, the high-minded couple gradually adapt to their hard-bitten mercenary neighbours, and to the mix of abundance and decay that surrounds them. Death is everywhere. Even the coffins in the church graveyard have to be lead-weighted ‘to keep the bodies from rising before Christ, upthrust from the mud’. Disease – cholera, consumption, malaria and other nameless fevers – seeps out of the swampland. When it strikes in the manse it kills David and drives Rose to insanity. Only Joy – now in her teens – is left unharmed, as it falls to her to survive (and support her mother) among the ruins. Enter their new neighbours, Randolph and Randy Jnr. Avaricious and venal, they are soon circling Joy as they would their prey – seeking to possess her body, as well as her family home and possessions. In a world where creatures are hunted and killed for short-term gain, Joy must learn to fight back if she is to survive. The Hungry and the Lost does not aspire to subtlety of characterisation, any more than it aspires to realism. Just as Joy (and her parents) are unfailingly good and heroic, Randolph and Randy are stock melodrama villains. In place of realism, Bethany Pope (a poet as well as novelist) successfully employs lyrical, hauntingly evocative passages to create a dreamlike, mythical world. -- Liz Jones @ www.gwales.com