Snakehunter

Rating:
Summary: Snakehunter's Time Has Come Again (or at last)
Review: Chuck Kinder's Snakehunter is not your typical coming of age fiction and the protagonist, Speer, is anything but your run-of the-mill boy.

After his father's death, Speer and his mother find they must relocate from city-life to rural West Virginia, to the hometown of his mother. Speer is thrust into his strange mountain family; including a pair of overbearing, sometimes well-meaning aunts; an abusive overweight cousin who calls himself Hercules; a goodnatured uncle who serves as a buffer to the family friction; a grandfather whose past, legend has it, included murder; and Speer's beloved intellectual cousin Catherine, a happy-hour-all-day gal with, at least initially, a placid boozer's imagination easily accessable to Speer.

Sounds straightforward enough, huh?

Enter Kinder's manipulation of time and place. He brings the reader back and forth over a twenty year period, without breaking the stories pace or cohesivness. He also uses sociological examples to give the story unique perspective on a wide range of "interesting" tribal traditions.

Kinder's language is beautiful, especially dealing with scenery and nature, which serves as a nessessary backdrop to this well told story.

Snakehunter is a feast of form; it prompts one to wonder: How did Kinder weave this tale together without allowing the seams to show through? Snakehunter's form was possibly ahead of its time in the cynical years surrounding the Nixon administration (1973). Read this novel tomorrow. Appreciate its freshness, its language, its warmth, its grit, its honesty and, most importantly, Kinder's guts.