Wednesday, March 8, 2017

"The Weight of This World"

David Joy is the author of the Edgar nominated novel Where All Light Tends To Go (Putnam, 2015), as well as the novels The Weight Of This World (Putnam, 2017) and The Line That Held Us (Putnam, TBD). He is also the author of 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.

Joy applied the Page 69 Test to The Weight Of This World and reported the following:
One of these days I’m going to write a scene on page sixty-nine of a manuscript just for this test, just for this blog, and inevitably either my editor will cut the scene or something will happen in design that puts it a page short or a page long so that once again I’m left with nothing. That’s my way of saying, just like last time, page sixty-nine doesn’t do a whole lot to capture the overall mood of my second novel, The Weight Of This World. What we find on that page is two addicts, Aiden McCall and Thad Broom, rummaging through a house for anything they can sell or use to get high. What that scene does capture, I guess, is the narrative trigger of the novel, the catalyst of the rest of the story, which is this: when Aiden and Thad witness the accidental death of their drug dealer and a riot of dope and cash drops in their laps, their lives are blown apart on a meth-fueled journey to nowhere. You can turn to page seventy, but I don’t think you’ll find a happy ending.
Visit David Joy's website.

Writers Read: David Joy (March 2015).

The Page 69 Test: Where All Light Tends to Go.

My Book, The Movie: Where All Light Tends to Go.

--Marshal Zeringue