Rich, wonderful exercises in not getting yourself killed

Fiction:Old Moses Tyler the bootlegger wasn't much of a father. That said, he was entitled to the casket his family bought for him.

Twilight By William Gay Faber, 224pp. £10.99.

Local undertaker Fenton Breece has become rich from burying the dead and is sufficiently eccentric for the townspeople to begin to wonder about his particular style of burying folk. Rumour and suspicion cause Tyler's teenage son and daughter, Kenneth and Corrie, to dig up dad and see if all is as it was intended.

It's not. The discovery makes them open up a few more graves. "These were nights of cold winter drizzles and sullen heavens with no one about and they felt perhaps rightly that the dark belonged to them . . . For they both by now moved in a peculiar detachment from reality. A sort of outraged disbelief that such things could be." Fenton Breece not only mutilates his clients, he arranges them in unholy poses and favours unsavoury photo shoots with the dead ladies, often featuring himself with them. He likes looking at these pictures and keeps them in his briefcase. Unfortunately for him, his briefcase is stolen and with it, and the photographs, goes his peace of mind - especially as it is young Kenneth Tyler, a man with good reason to dislike Breece, who intends on using them to expose the perverted undertaker.

Twilightis the third novel from the wonderful William Gay, an original with a flair for Southern Gothic and characterisation who brings the daring of Flannery O'Connor and William Gaddis to his lush and violent surrealist yarns. This new novel is lighter than its predecessors if still very black and very funny and again, beautifully written in his effortless, graceful prose.

Gay was born in 1944 and lives in Tennessee. His first novel, The Long Home, was published in the US in 1999, and his outstanding, offbeat second novel, Provinces of Night, about the Bloodworth clan, followed two years later. It had its British publication the same year, and within six months his first novel also appeared in the UK - both to fine reviews. Gay has also published short stories, and the collection I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Downis every bit as good as his novels.

Gay is a master of small-town aimlessness and his ear for speech, as spoken in the dialect of the southern states, serves his fiction brilliantly. His dialogue remains in the memory like a song. He looks to the Gothic tradition and is also alert to the nuances of the morality play as well as the European fairy tale. Above all he has a powerful sense of the prevailing comedy of existence. Considered individually and now as a body of work, Gay's fiction is the most exciting by a "new" as opposed to "young" southern writer to emerge since the West Virginian Breece D'J Pancake appeared on the scene in 1993 with Trilobites, a fierce and inspired collection. Pancake, by the way, killed himself in 1979, at the age of 25.

Gay looks set to continue chronicling small-town life as lived in the dense South. Much of the action of the new novel, which is dominated by a to-the-death chase, takes place through a dark backwoods landscape, the Harrikin. Into this wasteland, which was once populated and still bears traces of "old commerce", comes young Kenneth Tyler, pursued by the crazed Granville Sutter, a killer in the pay of the undertaker. By the time Tyler takes to the woods, Corrie has already been killed in a remarkable scene, one of many in a vivid narrative that lives off the page thanks to the lyric physicality of Gay's graphic storytelling.

YOUNG TYLER PROVESa likeable hero. But Gay certainly has fun with his villains. In Twilighthe has a contrasting pair in Fenton Breece and Granville Sutter. Breece is the kind of man who sits side by side with a dead girl, as if on a date, explaining Mahler to her. "This is a cycle of songs called the Kindertotenlieder. Translated, that means 'Songs of Dead Children.' Don't you think that's a nice touch of irony?" The narrative continues: "He went on lecturing the dead girl for some time about classical music and various composers and then he seemed stricken by some emotion." Meanwhile the dead girl, Tyler's sister, who in life had repulsed Breece's unwanted attention, "with her unfocused eyes stared out across the great empty room as if she watched something from across a vast gulf of distance or was straining to hear some faint and faroff sound."

Sutter is a different kind of madman, and a local to whom Tyler flees for help announces: "You think he's crazy? I know for a fact he is. I can guarangoddamntee he's crazy as a shitmouse and getting further into the territories all the time. And it's a thousand wonders I ain't lying here dead as my dog is yonder . . . " Earlier in the action, Sutter is seen in court facing a charge of murder for some previous wrong: "Sutter's lawyer was named Higgins. He wasn't very good, but he was cheap, and Sutter didn't figure he needed one anyway and had hired him simply as a matter of form." In a courtroom scene comparable to the inspired funeral day sequence in Provinces of Night, the prosecution says to Sutter: "I'll rephrase it. Do you know of any reason why a righthanded man would attack you with a weapon in his left hand?" Sutter, who is well aware that he had placed the fire poker in the dead man's hand, grins at the jury, before suggesting: "Maybe he was just spottin me a few points."

MOST OF THEcentral characters end up dead, but not before there are some comic exchanges. Lost in the Harrikin, Tyler meets a family and he admits to being lost. "Lost" repeats the father, Claude, "I know all about lost . . . I wrote the book on lost. I was lost myself till Jesus reached down tonight and plucked me out of the slop I was crawlin in and stood me on my own two feet."

The man looks to his wife for confirmation - which she supplies. "Claude was saved tonight . . . he was a drunkard for twentyodd year, but tonight he give it all up." Within hours, old Claude, having remembered that Tyler's dad was a bootlegger, asks if he happens to have "a little drink hid out?"

Young Tyler's odyssey is acted out against the backdrop of the collective history of the characters and the place in which they live. The boy laments his dead sister and also keeps his mind on survival, or rather, not getting killed - because life as an exercise in not getting yourself killed is a central theme in Gay's wonderfully rich, iconoclastic tales.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent ofThe Irish Times .