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    The Gone Dead: A Novel
    The Gone Dead: A Novel
    The Gone Dead: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Gone Dead: A Novel

    Written by Chanelle Benz

    Narrated by Bahni Turpin

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Billie James' inheritance isn't much: a little money and a shack in the Mississippi Delta. The house once belonged to her father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old. Though Billie was there when the accident happened, she has no memory of that day—and she hasn't been back to the South since.

     Thirty years later, Billie returns but her father's home is unnervingly secluded: her only neighbors are the McGees, the family whose history has been entangled with hers since the days of slavery. As Billie encounters the locals, she hears a strange rumor: that she herself went missing on the day her father died. As the mystery intensifies, she finds out that this forgotten piece of her past could put her in danger.

    Inventive, gritty, and openhearted, The Gone Dead is an astonishing debut novel about race, justice, and memory that lays bare the long-concealed wounds of a family and a country.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 25, 2019
    ISBN9780062917850
    Author

    Chanelle Benz

    Chanelle Benz has published work in Guernica, Granta.com, The New York Times, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence and others, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was published in 2017 by Ecco/HarperCollins. It was named a Best Book of 2017 by The San Francisco Chronicle and one of Electric Literature’s 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2017. It was also shortlisted for the 2018 Saroyan Prize and longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Story Prize. Her novel The Gone Dead was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in June 2019 and was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a Tonight Show Summer Reads Finalist. It was named a best new book of the summer by O, The Oprah Magazine, Time, Southern Living, and Nylon. She currently lives in Memphis where she teaches at Rhodes College.

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    Reviews for The Gone Dead

    4/5

    69 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I was expecting a Thriller. And while that is not technically what I read, I thoroughly enjoyed it! this book IS thrilling. The parts that are scary, are because they are based in fact! throughout history, the dichotomy between black people and white people is a product of much hate and aggression, usually towards the former. This book does an excellent job of showing how deep the racist beliefs held in the south run.

      my favorite line from the book:
      "White people have invented their fears about us and tried their damn best to make them true, but our fears about white people have always been real. White people have always had conspiracy theories about black people because you can't trust the people you are trying to keep down."
    • 4/5
      Alternating perspectives from several characters shows how people justify silence to protect themselves or those they love. It also slightly demonstrates how people who don't speak up can still consider themselves a "good" person. The narrative was engaging and the subject thought-provoking.
    • 4/5
      This novel, with a promising premise, is a disappointment. Billie, daughter of a Black poet/activist father and a white mother who meet during Freedom Summer in Mississippi, inherits her grandmother's dilapidated Delta home and moves in, putting aside her life and job in Philadelphia. Her father Cliff died under suspicious circumstances in Greendale when Billie was three, and with her mother now also gone, she becomes more curious about him. But there's very little of Billie revealed here; in fact, her dog Rufus, also inherited, is a more sympathetic character. She becomes involved with the white son of a neighbor, finds an early chapter of a memoir written by Cliff before his death, and enlists the help of an uncle, cousin, and a scholar who's writing her father's biography. But when the mystery is solved, the climactic scene is low key and lacking drama.Quote: "A Black man in the South walked around with a target on his back for every angry white man who felt life hadn't given him what he deserved."
    • 3/5
      Chanelle Benz makes her debut with The Gone Dead, a novel set deep in the Mississippi Delta near the turn of the twenty-first century (2002, to be exact). The novel begins with an interesting hook in which its main character Billie James, a young black woman, returns to the Delta to take possession of the shack of a home that once belonged to her father. Billie was only four years old when her father died, and she remembers almost nothing about that chaotic day. Now thirty-four years old, and returning to the South for the first time in thirty years, Billie is dangerously naïve about what to expect when she comes “home” to claim her property. All Billie knows is that her father died in some kind of bizarre accident near the old house – and that nobody, including her uncle and other family members, wants to talk about it. Although she had planned to stay in Mississippi for only a couple of weeks – a family reunion/ vacation kind of thing – Billie becomes so intrigued with the reluctance of anyone to tell her anything helpful about her father that she changes her plans. That’s when she makes a big mistake: she starts asking the kind of questions that make a whole lot of people so nervous that they want her to shut up and go away. And they are willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.The Gone Dead is about race relations in the South during the Jim Crow era - a period that lasted well into the 1960s. The number one priority of Jim Crow laws was segregation of the races, a policy that was enforced by threats of violence that often became reality for those blacks who dared try to change things for the better. Billie’s father, a poet, was one of those people who dreamed of better days, and Billie suspects that his accident may not have been exactly accidental. And now that she’s stirred up a hornet’s nest from the past, Billie may end up being a little accident-prone herself if she’s not careful.Bottom Line: The Gone Dead is a good enough debut novel, but it really doesn’t break any new ground and the story starts to feel like one you’ve heard too many times already. Benz, though, has created some interesting characters here, Billie James among them, and it’s easy to root for them as they finally begin to realize just how deeply they gotten themselves into a situation that could cost them their lives. Really, this is a pretty good mystery – even if it has the kind of open-ended finale that will probably not please readers who like their mysteries to be wrapped up a little more tightly at the end.
    • 3/5
      Very atmospheric, but I would have enjoyed just a little more mystery.
    • 4/5
      A debut novel of history and family in the Mississippi delta. Billie, her father found dead in what was called an accident when she was four, returns to the Delta in what she hopes is a short visit. Her mother recently gone as well, she wants to see, what is basically little more than a shack and to visit her uncle, her father's much young brother. She finds more than she expected and finds herself the target of those who do not want the truth of her father's death to be revealed.I'm not a big fan of stories that use multiple viewpoints within, often feeling that characterization is lost. Here though it works, Billie our main narrator, but also others that fill in the blanks from what she was too young to remember. The Delta is portrayed with depth and authenticity, firmly entrenching this story in time and place. A time of racial injustice and when recurring racism was the norm. The dialogue is another strong point, fitting each character with admirable efficiency. As each layer is peeled away, new revelations are revealed, the danger Billie is in heightens. This is, in my opinion, a wonderful first effort by a talented new writer.ARC from Netgalley.
    • 4/5
      Because there are many secrets, the author chose to tell the story from many points of view, but some of the viewpoints fail to flow into or with the narrative. There are also many lies and many more good intentions gone wrong, together forming a fascinating story, but the mystery of what happened to one character overtakes the whole book, or maybe it was just that what I wanted the book to explore most was eclipsed by the mystery. I wanted to know more about Clifton James' return, why he chose to go back to Mississippi and how his connection to childhood friend Jim had altered with time, and what exactly the radical notions were that he passed to teen crush turned settled wife of another man Shirley. And I wanted to know more about the primary narrator, James' daughter, and how she would have reacted to James' radical ideas, and about James' younger brother and his regrets and perceptions of James as a man, a poet, and a radical. These three members of the James family and perhaps one outside point of view could have evinced parallels and conflicts that the full array of POVs could not exemplify and that the insufficiently connected medieval history anecdotes could not mirror with that strangeness that gives counterpoint its beauty. Would like to see more from this author, just more finished, more tightly woven.