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The growing
market of e-books lends itself to innovative, edgy new voices—but
M. David Hornbuckle's novella The Salvation of Billy Wayne
Carter tries much too hard to be innovative and edgy for
its own good.
Hornbuckle's
story centers around a mysterious stranger, Billy Wayne Carter,
who pulls himself up by his guitar strap to become both an
icon of rock music and an iconoclast of the cultural establishment.
His influence is so pervasive, so startlingly powerful, that
America's culture wars erupt into civil war.
The problem
is that Hornbuckle wants his characters to be far more fascinating
than they really are. He wants his title character, for instance,
to be vaguely dangerous and electrically sexy (think Rebel
Without a Cause with a dash of redneck Sean Connery).
"He's on the run, although not so much on the run from something,
but for something," Hornbuckle writes.
Carter
meets a sexy-but-misunderstood young woman, Jenny Mae, who
is marginalized by her small town because she's so much more
brilliant and enlightened and talented and yadda yadda yadda…
You know the stereotype. She's "dark and beautiful" and "[h]er
first words are the truest he has ever heard." Of course,
she goes on to be Carter's muse. Within two pages of meeting
her, she and Carter are having sex in the booth in the bar
where they meet. It is, thank God, the only sex scene in the
novel, written with all the grace of a clumsy teenager who
has just discovered bad porn with pretensions of art.
Carter
needs to achieve the actual "cult of personality" status that
Hornbuckle claims he has. Rather than rush the book—which
is a short 60 pages—Hornbuckle could spend more time
with Carter, explore more of Carter's inner electricity, and
make readers want to hang out with the guy. After all, Carter
becomes The World's Biggest Rock Star. Readers should want
to be his groupies.
Many
of the other characters who pass through the novel do so in
a David Lynch-like haze. The things they see and experience
frequently seem more surreal than real. Hornbuckle provides
some colorful—and sometimes fascinatingly grotesque—tangents,
such as the mentally handicapped twins, obese and naked, who
are kept locked in a hidden upstairs room by their father
so they can "entertain" his customers; a wife who retreats
into her own psyche and thereafter refuses to move from her
bed; and a bearded giant named Mangoat.
In a
twisted kind of way, many of the characters embody various
aspects of John Lennon: the charismatic musician, the rock
icon, the new-age guru, the man who refused to get out of
bed, the martyr, the troubled philosopher/writer. There's
a character in Billy Wayne Carter to play each role.
The parts
never add up to a Lennon-like sum, though Hornbuckle tries
to pass Carter off as such. Readers see nothing that merits
the iconic status; people just talk about what an icon Carter
is. All that talk just isn't all that interesting.
Hornbuckle
could make it more interesting by taking the time to dig.
Whether they're supposed to be iconic or oddballish, the characters
still need depth. Hornbuckle has just enough of a start to
get a reader's attention, but then he needs to give readers
someplace to go.
Halfway
through the novella, the story suddenly fast-forwards 20 years,
and the tone shifts from white trash Twin Peaks surrealism
to hipster postmodernism. By the time the National Endowment
for the Arts gets firebombed, an event "which sent the government
into a full-blown state of emergency," the book verges on
satire. If that's where Hornbuckle intends to take the tone,
though, the subtle satire is too subtle to quite get there.
By the
novella's end, one of the characters, who's had only the slightest
peripheral connection to Carter, collides with Carter's world
for no real apparent reason. Hornbuckle tries to imbue the
encounter with gravitas, but the entire encounter comes off
as rushed and pointless. That might, in fact, be the point—after
all, "stuff happens"—but if so, Hornbuckle could still
foreshadow that theme more clearly earlier in the book.
The
Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter is available as a downloadable
PDF from Cantarabooks, which bills itself as a "boutique small
press." Cantarabooks at least presents itself as a credible
publisher, and the technical quality of this manuscript shows
standards well above those of vanity publishers. The book
is, if nothing else, clean—indicating good editorial
guidance.
To Hornbuckle's
credit, he does seem to be a technically competent writer,
and he does have a distinct voice. He also has an intriguing
idea. Billy Wayne Carter may be an experiment that fails—and
maybe it even fails spectacularly—but Hornbuckle does
have the potential to be the edgy and innovative writer he's
trying so hard to be—if he would just take his time.
(November,
2007)
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