Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Books That Changed the World)

by Barry Hannah

'A tour de force of dark humour... all wrought in the kind of eloquently twisted prose for which this southern Gothic master brooks no peer' Elle

'A literary event . . . The welcome return of a brilliant writer. . . . [A] blunt, unvarnished vision of the human species.' New York Times


Yonder Stands Your Orphan is an electrifying story about how the denizens of a lakeside community in Mississippi are beset by madness, murder and sin in the form of Man Mortimer. Mortimer, a creature of the casinos who looks like the dead country singer Conway Twitty, is a killer who has turned mean and sick. He visits upon the town by EagleLake wreckage of biblical proportions.
Yonder Stands Your Orphan is a tour de force. It is an hysterical and unremittingly gothic account of obsession, violence, sex and religion in America's Deepest South.
'A sensibility that is truly sui generis... Yonder Stands Your Orphan is three hundred and thirty-six pages of supreme aesthetic bliss' Wall Street Journal

• ISBN10: 1843540061
• ISBN13: 9781843540069
• Publish Date: 11 September 2003 (first published 26 June 2001)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 11 August 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Atlantic Books
• Edition: Main
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 352
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

I needed something batshit crazy and bighearted, and there’s nobody better for both than Barry Hannah. My favorite when reading him is to forget— just for a minute, just long enough— all the ongoing story and pick a line, any line, to marvel at the mini-story packed inside it.

“Lightning loved the swamp. The willows thrashed now where all the souls of dead bad poets roamed day and night.”

“Spanish words, Japanese thoughts, for these elves of Confederate trash.”

“Here was a man who in his bad, bad days had almost blown Roman over on a gravel road riding his giant Harley next to Roman’s little motorbike, loaded with fish. Now a Christian orator when he was not playing hooky from the Anonymous program.”

“Some things were sin and the others just math.”

A million stories for one, these screwy sentences that ring with drop-dead truth. You could pick a page blind, point and find one. Here. Page 181. “‘Nice,’ said Carl Bob Feeney, less insane than last week.”