What the Critics Say About Redgunk Tales

Sort of like Thomas Wolfe on acid, or James Joyce on moonshine, Bill Eakin takes the words, the rhythms, the heat, the mud, the cicadas and the kudzu of the south and turns them into stories that touch your heart while messing with your brain stem and possibly tampering with your DNA. A truly original and unique voice....

—Shawna McCarthy, Realms of Fantasy

....poetic and unusual....

—Publisher’s Weekly

So what are the Redgunk Tales? They’re stories, sit-around-on-the-step-and listen-to-your-crazy-uncle-bullshit stories. They have that kind of easy rhythm and flow and enthusiasm, and they’re written with a love of the sound of language that doesn’t rear its head often...a richness...that lifts it beyond pure regionalism and into an altogether more sparsely populated neighborhood....cracking good read. It’s one of those collections that’s so rich that it’s best read one story at a time, so that each can be savored and enjoyed on its own terms. It’s a slower read that way but then again, that’s more time spent in Redgunk. And that just can’t be a bad thing.

—Rowan Innish, The Green Man Review (July 2001)

...award winners...sometimes touching, Eakin is a postmodernist, feminist, “literary” writer...

—Book List

Bill Eakin is one of the more inventive writers making a name for himself today…. His southern-fried narrative is (in the opinion of this Bama Boy) one-hundred percent faithful and twice as irreverent.

—Kurt Roth, Tangent

Eloquent and witty, thoughtful and even heart-rending. . . . Every time I’ve read a Redgunk story recently, I’ve come away thinking the most recent was better than what I had seen before. I’m coming to realize that it’s not a question of better; each one has been good on its own. . . .Bill Eakin is a brilliant storyteller

—Kim Mohan, Amazing Stories

Redgunk is simultaneously a place of prosaic horror and impossible beauty…. author William R. Eakin provides readers with plenty of swamp gas and a piercing view into the human soul. All of the stories in this collection interweave the fabric of everyday life with fantasy elements ranging from the bizarre to the beautiful. A rich and sorcerous brew… Readers who cannot get enough of wonky fantasy will want to rush out right now and get their hands on this book. William R. Eakin’s strange combination of day-to-day living and the stuff of tabloid headlines makes for potent fiction, combining heartbreak with humor in every story. Redgunk is brimming with life’s harsh realities—abused wives, children with birth defects, drunk drivers, inhumane and greedy land developers—revealing the darkest hues of human behavior. His stories, however, are never entirely bleak. The Mississippi landscape in which they take place is thoroughly enchanted, fully capable of supporting any Redgunkers who strive to save themselves from ruin….Eakin reminds readers of the great power which drives the genre….Despite its bizarre occurrences and wandering ghosts, Redgunk is convincingly real. It may not have all that many residents, but readers will be convinced they know them all, alive, dead or undead, with their generous hearts and dark secrets.

Eakin’s work is enormous fun. It smacks you between the eyes with appalling real-life situations and then somehow makes it all okay.

—from A. M. Dellamonica, Science Fiction Weekly May, 2001

Little Redgunk's a weird world popping with possibilities.

By RON WOLFE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE April 29, 2001

Publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock, AR) Page: H4

Word Count: 469

Redgunk Tales: Apocalypse and Kudzu From Redgunk, Mississippi, by William R. Eakin, Invisible Cities Press, 278 pages, $14.95. Review

Redgunk, Miss., bewilders even some of the oddballs who live in Arkansas author William R. Eakin's fictional but hardly make-believe little town.

"Why did you ever move us to Redgunk, your beautiful, brilliant family?" a ruined boy asks his father in Eakin's story, "Encounter in Redgunk."

The answer lies in his father's conviction that "bright and intelligent people were needed more here than wherever else they might have gone."

Take a wrong turn way out in the country, and you, too, might wind up someplace like Redgunk -- some ramshackle, hot, dead, fly-buzzing, kudzu-smothered place where you'd rather not stop even for gas.

Who would live here by choice, you wonder? What goes on? Why this feeling that you've interrupted something better left alone?

Rod Serling felt the same way. Several episodes of his The Twilight Zone TV series start with someone wandering into a creepy little town.

But Eakin deals with shadows and substances of a deeper nature than The Twilight Zone. The appropriately 13 stories in Redgunk Tales reflect the author's diverse background, including that he edited a series of books about world religions and Zen.

The comic tone that runs through Eakin's stories is deceptive, as when he declares in "Encounter in Redgunk" that "Orange Decker had been abducted by some danged UFO."

The story seems to promise a spoof on small-town life, only to finish with just the opposite -- a wild dispelling of stereotypes. Eakin's people may have funny names and live in junk, but cosmic mysteries swirl around them.

The book collects stories published in magazines including Amazing Stories, Science Fiction Age and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, all set in Redgunk.

"If you have ever lived in Blake County -- Cornstuff, Blue Falls, Felpham, or any place like Redgunk, you know that the better part of what I have done in these stories is just to report the facts," he writes in the book's preface.

Fact is, you can see a mummy for 50 cents at Uncle Joe's Corner Liquor Store and Gas. And the mummy might see you.

And fact is, being dead never kept fat old Lawnmower Moe from firing up his Wal-Mart push mower for another run at those 40 acres of kudzu.

Eakins, like H.P. Lovecraft, hints at profound and terrible secrets. Like Anne Tyler, he writes about people so human, they can lift and break your heart.

He writes fantasy, or what those of more literary bent might call fabulist fiction, but the message is plain fact, too: The world is full of possibilities.

If all this can happen in nowhere Redgunk, Eakin seems to say, imagine the wonders that may be streaming below the surface of your own life.

Slug Line: H,0429redgunk

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock, AR)

Date: April 29, 2001

Page: H4

I’ve envied Bill Eakin’s work now for the better part of twenty years. And if this is your first foray into Redgunk, Mississippi, then I also envy you for the discovery you’re about to make. To those merely eyeing the exit ramp, though, not-wrongly wary of potential dangers, imagine a lyrical Ray Bradbury sharing bong hits with a salty Stephen King as they write a delightfully bizarre Twilight Zone script that somehow ends up on Hee Haw. There’s poetry in them there Redgunk swamps, and splendor in the inadvertent genius and private profanities of the people who live in and around them. There’s magic to be unearthed, terror to be suffered, passion and irreverence to be savored, and silliness abound. But there’s also familiarity, albeit beautifully skewed through Bill’s wonderfully warped lens. Even if you’ve never tried cornbread, even if you’ve never ventured below the Mason-Dixon, chances are the residents of Redgunk will remind you (perhaps a little too much) of someone you already know. That’s because for all their secrets, charms, otherworldly exploits and colossal flaws, the folks there are us—lyrical, salty, and delightfully bizarre. So climb up onto the porch and make yourself at home awhile. People in these parts are only too happy to share a story, and I promise you’ll be glad you came.

— Aaron Christopher Drown, October, 2021

William R. Eakin’s stories soar and scatter like crows before buckshot. You never know which direction they’ll go, but to read them is to be taken to a place where the journey truly does matter more than the destination. There is a whiff of the old masters here: Bradbury, Faulkner, O’Connor, and something more, something that is all Eakin. It’s his voice, sure, a voice that rings out with the fury and truth of thunder over a dark cornfield. It’s also the mood, the wisdom, the humor, and yes, the bits of intangible magic that push these stories beyond the restraints of literature and into the realm of myth. Redgunk—and these stories— will stay with me forever.

— Hank Early

Eakin expertly weaves 38 stories set in the fictional town of Redgunk, Miss., written over the past 30 years, into a bizarre and captivating whole.

— Publisher’s Weekly

The National Enquirer meets the Bhagavad-Gita in William R. Eakin’s Redgunk Tales. Eakin captures a wild, primitive, funny side of the South soaked in New Age spirituality and Jack Daniels whiskey. Occasionally these stories give off a wysteria-like sweetness…

—Hal Jacobs, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (July, 2001)

There is something magical happening in this small, archetypical Southern town, and story-teller William Eakin…invites the reader to observe and participate in the lives of its 400 people, one dog, several skunks... and one mummy…they are the people of this world; they are our selves and our acquaintances, made a little larger by their position under the microscope, in the swarming, swamp-gassy petri-dish of Redgunk. Forces mystical and mundane gather and work here, and the common thread that binds these stories is the manners in which human life is changed by encounters with Otherness.

Like a gardener to a well, Eakin returns to the theme of transformation, using squalid little Redgunk and its inhabitants to tell us, again and again, that all human beings are moved and changed and made more by the mysterious, the grand, and the unexpected.

—Matthew Nadelhaft, Tangent On-Line

“Encounter in Redgunk”… The way it gets under the skins of its characters is unexpected, and effective.

—Mark R. Kelly, Locus, January, 1999

I am a huge fan of William Eakin. Thank you Mr. Eakin for making me remember why I love reading in the first place. That is, being at the mercy of a good storyteller is a wonderful place to be.

—Karen (fan letter), Realms of Fantasy, April, 1998. Donovan-Keefe, RI

Cheek by jowl with Eakin’s selection of rural louts and eccentrics, there’s a recurring element straight out of classical literature—an educated sensitivity steeped in ancient myths, tragedies, and folklore, whether the theme be fantastic or SFnal...when his offbeat juxtapositions work, they’re startlingly effective...[Redgunk] manages to combine the spirit of intellectually rigorous science fiction with the fantastic complexity of the human heart until it can’t be labeled as a work from any genre. At his best, Eakin creates a genre all his own.

—Faren Miller, Locus (May, 2001):

What a marvelous gift you have for story telling. I think [your Redgunk stories] are just so simply entertaining and refreshing, something that is very rare these days...keep writing! We need more writers like you.

—June Hubbard, editor-in-chief, Chameleon Publishing, January, 1999

“Hot damn,” as Bobby Joe Raymond Thorton might say.

—Kim Mohan, Amazing Stories

What I found when I turned to Redgunk Tales was a fascinating new voice in fiction. My own comparisons feel their way toward a strange but wonderful union of Ray Bradbury and Harry Crews, with a liberal mixture of Cormac McCarthy’s spiraling Faulknerian prose. Indeed, what I really admire about Eakin’s style is his ability…to draw together divergent strands of prose styles and somehow make that marriage work. In a single story such as “Redgunk, Texas,” Bill Eakin’s first-person narrator is capable of both a homespun voice reminiscent of Huck Finn (“He was a gangly boy with a big ole Adam’s apple. . .”) and a sort of kaleidoscopic prose poetry that recalls the romantic ecstasies of Whitman or even Kerouac… The possibilities of language, the necessity of using the right voice and prose style at the right moment in order to capture just the right narrative drift—Eakin explores these provocative issues in his writing. And he does so successfully.

—Tim Edwards, Ph.D.

“Unicorn Stew” runs the emotional gamut from grisly to ultimately uplifting, showing the lengths to which a mother will go to protect one of her children from an abusive father...Eakin’s evocation of the last of the modern unicorns was quite memorable.

—David A. Truesdale, SF Site: 1998 Editor’s Choice

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

“Encounter in Redgunk” manages to be quite moving....

—Rich Horton, Tangent Online, 1999

An imagination and vision that is second to none. A first rate teacher, able to emotionally connect to his students, young and more mature alike. He creates spaces in these relationships where people not only feel they learn something, but grow in spiritual and creative ways. I felt lucky to experience that myself. Kindness and goodwill, and optimism. And the flat out feeling that we all possess creativity that can rocket us to the stars and to special places climbing out of space and time. I hope you will get the recognition you so richly deserve, may your stories inspire and reach an ever growing audience.

—Dean Bowlus, reader