DAREN DEAN

Far Beyond the Pale, A Novel (Fiction Southeast Press, 2015)

Daren Dean

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​Honey Boy is a thirteen-year-old, four-letter-spouting, pistol-packing kid who is determined to learn something about the art of thieving swag from Kingdom County's own resident outlaw: Vaughn-a man so wicked that he is gone beyond the pale in his outrageous acts which include ransacking homes, stealing livestock, and intimidating his neighbors. Honey Boy falls under the tutelage of Vaughn, a natural born killer with the conscience of a sociopath. What follows is a conclusion so violent that even Vaughn might wonder if he hasn't done his job too well. Vigilantes in Fairmont surround the outlaw at his favorite tavern with deer rifles and revolvers drawn in a modern southern novel with an explosive climax.

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PRAISE FOR PALE

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“In FAR BEYOND THE PALE Daren Dean grandly and seamlessly joins terror and tenderness, gravity and sublime lightness, and he does so through the narrative voice of a boy so endearingly and vulnerably real that he turns into lost kin you keep worrying about long after the book has been put down. Dean writes like the laureate of fallen angels. He is an important new voice in our literary culture.”—Robert Olen Butler, author of The Empire of Night, The Star of Istanbul, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

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Daren Dean shoots from the hip and his characters follow his example. Alive with language, FAR BEYOND THE PALE makes you feel like you're sitting in the back of the car with the windows down, listening to the cast wonder about what comes next, and you slap on your seat belt to make sure you are safe for the raucous ride.

-Michael Farris Smith, author of NICK, THE FIGHTER, RIVERS 

 

The torch that fell when we lost Harry Crews and Larry Brown has been upraised by many, but in the hands of Daren Dean that sacred flame burns with a new and brilliant fire. FAR BEYOND THE PALE is Grit Lit pure true. For those of us who love it, Dean perfectly packs double-barrels of violence and linguistic verve.

-Kent Wascom, The Blood of Heaven and Secessia

 

Daren Dean writes in the school of Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and William Gay. His fiction is funny, deep, ironic, and just twisted enough to hold a reader tight. In his novel, a kid grows up, the mean grow meaner, and we come to care about what happens in this Missouri town that could be just over the next rise from Faulkner’s famous Jefferson, Mississippi.

-Clyde Edgerton, Author of Raney, The Bible Salesman, The Night Train...

 

The next time you pull into a Missouri town and think for a minute that there’s no one worth saving and nothing’s going on, you’ll hark back to this novel and the heartbreaking story of Honey Boy and his desperately lovely Mama. And then you’ll cry a lonesome river. Go on. I dare you.

-Steve Yates, author of Some Kinds of Love: Stories, Morkan’s Quarry, and its sequel, The Teeth of the Souls