Banjo Grease
But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don't try to hold him, that he can't escape from. --William Faulkner, Light in August
There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term "eager fatalism." These stories' cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naivete for worldliness, what is lost in denying one's past?
Dennis Must is the author of three novels: Brother Carnival (Red Hen Press, November 2018), The World’s Smallest Bible (Red Hen Press, March 2014), and Hush Now, Don’t Explain (Coffeetown Press, October 2014), as well as three short story collections: Going Dark (Coffeetown Press, 2016), Oh, Don’t Ask Why (Red Hen Press, 2007), and Banjo Grease (Creative Arts Book Company, 2000). He won the 2014 Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award for Hush Now, Don’t Explain, and The World’s Smallest Bible was a 2014 USA Best Book Award Finalist in the Literary Fiction category. His plays have been produced Off-Off Broadway and he has been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals. He resides with his wife in Salem, Massachusetts.
http://www.dennismust.com/index.html
