Citrus County

May 10, 2010
Brandon (Arkansas) finds shards of redemption in the swampy backwaters of Florida in his funny and horrifying latest. When Shelby Register moves to Citrus County, Fla., with her single father and little sister, she's expecting "surfers instead of rednecks," but the precocious teen makes the best of it. Things get screwy when Toby, a neglected, loveless boy living with his abusive uncle, becomes her twisted love interest. Toby finds trouble far more elaborate than ordinary delinquency when he enacts a strange, cruel plot on the Register clan. Presiding over it all in his own confused state is Mr. Hibma, a young teacher draped in irony and disaffection who lectures on the evils of capitalism, avoids his colleagues, and wants to do good but isn't sure how. As the Register family's misery deepens, Shelby begins to test boundaries, Toby realizes that he can't reverse the effects of his "prank," and his and Shelby's braided fates hurtle toward either tragedy or a narrow miss. Brandon's dry wit, dark imagination, and surprisingly big heart combine to reveal a Florida that, despite (or because of) being more Ted Bundy than Disney World, is absolutely worth visiting.

June 1, 2010

An adolescent boy in rural Florida attempts to find himself in this Southern Gothic novel from Florida native Brandon (Arkansas, 2008).

Toby is a minor delinquent in Citrus County whose rebellious behavior belies his dangerously unemotional state. Constantly abused by his uncle, the boy has shut down, operating on instincts uninformed by any moral grounding. To punish his classmate, an overzealous girl named Shelby, Toby kidnaps her little sister and imprisons her in a remote bunker. To his credit, Brandon's dispassionate portrait of his offender is made even creepier by its lack of true menace. "He did not feel alone," he writes. "He felt egged on by something greater. It wasn't Kaley's fault, and it wasn't even Toby's. He would be different now; he would be new. He would possess a secret that would put him above his uncle and his teachers and Coach Scolle and all the convenience store clerks and all the nameless punks of Citrus County who thought knocking over mailboxes and stealing cigarettes would save them." But Toby is far from being the sole freak in the county. Brandon also focuses much of his attention on a secondary character, Mr. Hibma, an arrogant, masturbatory teacher who struggles to maintain control of his emotions, even as he plans to smother another teacher to death. He's a classic phony, but the character lends much-needed humor to an ominous tale that jangles the nerves. Toby and Shelby fall into that unlikely and inevitable gravity of adolescent attraction, exploring their desires even as Kaley wastes away, while Brandon dares readers to avert their eyes.

If Flannery O'Connor wrote Holden Caulfield as a child-snatcher, this is the mess she would make.

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