Bull Mountain (Panowich) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[Brian Panowich] pulls off [a] daunting undertaking with astounding success.... The storytelling is mesmerizing, with virtually every chapter set in a different timeline and focused on a single character, but the sense of immediacy carries over into each era.  And while the violence is shocking in its coldhearted brutality, it’s as aesthetically choreographed as any ballet.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review


Panowich has crafted a satisfying and smartly constructed book whose time-shifting sequences build suspense even as they parcel out telling revelations. Once events are in full play, there’s no turning back.
Wall Street Journal


[Panowich storms] onto the scene with an epic southern tale that establishes him as a new voice for southern writers.... An unabashed literary page-turner, Bull Mountain, takes readers along for a ride full of well timed twists and turns, and the shocking family secret that causes the inevitable climax....one of the best multi-generational family sagas in years.
Huffington Post


You’d be hard pressed to believe Bull Mountain is the work of a debut author. What Panowich puts together is more than a history of family, but a chronology of the violence perpetrated for nearly a century in maintaining an empire built on bootleg hooch and drugs—not in the name of power, women, or money, but of home.... Panowich’s Southern grit is stubborn and gets into every crevice..... [H]e tears apart the hardened, Southern man so popular in rural noir. Even more, he does so while maintaining that those characters have a moral, human center.
Los Angeles Review of Books


A brilliant debut novel....extraordinary.
Atlanta Magazine


Prose as punchy as rapid-aged whiskey.
Esquire


Part Dashiell Hammett, part Hamlet.... The story of a familial criminal empire embedded in the mountains of North Georgia, [Bull Mountain] is a book that never lets a complicated plot and structure get in the way of what, I believe, is Panowich’s greatest gift—the ability to build layered, authentic characters and the world in which they live.... Graceful prose, compelling characters, and a true sense of place [make this] gripping reading.
Augusta Chronicle


The author delivers characters with depth, a lushly described setting, and an intergenerational battle between good and evil. After many twists and turns, the story ends with a welcome surprise.... His book...brings the landscape and culture of rural Appalachia to life.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Dazzling.... Panowich tells his story in lengthy, nicely worked chapters reminiscent of John Steinbeck.... Both write in a flowing, textured, understated style that is such a pleasure to read we don’t realize we’re being set up for a series of uppercuts. They come in revelations accompanied by gunfire.
Booklist


Hillbilly noir goes literary in Panowich's debut, which is part crime fiction and part family saga.... Panowich deftly delves into "something deeper than bone" between fathers and sons, between the land and its people.
Kirkus Reviews