Scott Blackburn is an English instructor and a 2017 graduate of the Mountainview MFA program. He lives in High Point, North Carolina with his wife and two children. When he is not writing and teaching, Blackburn enjoys training in combat sports such as boxing, Muay Thai, and Ju-jitsu, in which he holds a black belt.
At CrimeReads he tagged seven top first person narrators from crime novels, including:
Jess Hall, from Wiley Cash’s A Land More Kind than HomeRead about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.
I’m a real sucker for novels that straddle the line between literary fiction and crime fiction, and Wiley Cash’s debut is one of my all-time favorites. This novel,about the death of a young, mute boy during a faith healing service, is told by three distinct narrators, including a sheriff, an 80-year-old woman, and the deceased boy’s brother, nine-year-old Jess Hall. Jess, who’s forced to grow up way too fast when he realizes how corrupt his local church is, immediately endeared me with his curious, innocent wander that’s so true to boyhood. For a child to understand and express the complexities of grief that life sometimes forces upon them is beyond difficult, but Cash mastered this feat with Jess’s character.
A Land More Kind Than Home is among Tom Bouman's top ten rural noir novels.
My Book, The Movie: A Land More Kind Than Home.
--Marshal Zeringue