" So, here it is: Heading Out to Wonderful. A man arrives in Brownsburg, Virginia, in the summer of 1948. He brings with him two suitcases. In the first are his clothes and a fine set of butcher knives. The second suitcase is filled with money. A lot of money. He sets foot on the ground of Virginia, in the countryside where I live now, and the story that I first heard thirty years ago begins to breathe." Robert Goolrick
"Charlie’s a butcher, and a good one. The existing butcher hires him and befriends him. Soon the butcher’s 5-year-old son, Sam, reveres him, and Charlie becomes like a second father to the lad. Enter Sylvan Glass, the young wife of the loathsome, morbidly obese Boaty Glass — the richest man in Brownsburg. Boaty has literally bought Sylvan from her father, a hardscrabble farmer outside of town, and made her his wife." Washington Post
"For southerners, the past is as real as the present; it is not even past, as Faulkner said." Robert Goolrich
