"Where All Light Tends to Go"

David Joy is the author of the novels Where All Light Tends to Go (Putnam, 2015) and Waiting On The End Of The World (Putnam, 2016), as well as the memoir Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman's Journey (Bright Mountain Books, 2011), which was a finalist for the Reed Environmental Writing Award and the Ragan Old North State Award for Creative Nonfiction.

Joy applied the Page 69 Test to Where All Light Tends to Go and reported the following:

A great poet and friend of mine, Ron Houchin, made me do the Page 69 Test right after I’d finished Where All Light Tends To Go, and, well, I was a tad disappointed. That’s a page of dialogue between Jacob McNeely and Maggie Jennings when Jacob has come looking to try and get her back. I tend to prefer really thick language, something like the opening lines of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, so a page of dialogue doesn’t get my gears turning like other parts of the novel. At the same time, that scene is essential in that it’s the first moment that we see Jacob entertaining the thought of something better. That’s the moment in the book that we start to see him recognize that there just might be one thing that can break the cycle he was born into. It’s her.

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--Marshal Zeringue