'Going into the dark is part of the fun': Michael Farris Smith on his new novel and Southern responsibility

Plus: Win a SIGNED copy of "Lay Your Armor Down"! Details below.

Photo by Billy Freeman on Unsplash

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There are few lonelier places in the United States than a Mississippi back road after midnight. The darkness is tangible, the Delta air thick and heavy, and the grim history of the land slithers up on you. And the only thing worse than traveling these roads alone is seeing a pair of headlights appear — and then draw closer — in your rear-view mirror.

“There’s so much that moves in the dark at night,” says Michael Farris Smith, a Mississippian and award-winning novelist. “It sounds like monsters when it’s really like a little rabbit. It’s really something very harmless. But if we can’t see it, we think it’s a lion about to jump out and kill us. Or a panther, to use the south Mississippi reference.”

But sometimes, it’s not just a little rabbit in the darkness. Sometimes it’s something much, much worse.

Smith is fast becoming one of the South’s standout authors, and in the hypertalented literary world of Oxford, Mississippi, that’s one hell of an accomplishment. His latest novel, Lay Your Armor Down, just hit shelves, and it’s a sparse, tense book-length chase that tempts you down some lonely paths, chases you down others. It’s the latest entry in a career that includes multiple award-winning novels (two, Desperation Road and The Fighter, were recently made into feature films), plus a prequel to The Great Gatsby entitled Nick. He’s also a film director who fronts a rock band — more on that below — and he finds time to go to the wall politically for his native Mississippi. He’s a busy cat, is what we’re saying, and he took some time out to talk Armor and other matters with me. Settle in.

“It started the same way all the other novels have started, in which I just had one image in my mind of something that I couldn’t shake, and so I started following that image,” Smith says of Armor. “In this instance, it was an old woman wandering off into the woods in the middle of the night.” The woman, Smith decided, had to have dementia, leaving her home and wandering into the dark woods.

“As she’s walking, I’m like, ‘She’s got to do something. She has to go somewhere,’” he says. “And then at the end of that first scene, she walks up on these two guys sitting by a campfire. And that was Chapter Two — who are these two guys?”

The two guys, as it turns out, are a couple of underemployed henchman-types named Burdean and Keal. They’re on a job they don’t quite understand, for someone they don’t know, for reasons neither can quite put into words. They’re two men huddled by a fire with an all-encompassing darkness around them, and eyes are on them from all sides.

That lonely, fearsome darkness is a physical presence, perhaps even an actual character, in Armor, and that’s very much by design.

“I've always just been a fan of landscape,” Smith says. “I do love the countryside. I do love a sunset. I do love the dark.” He assesses the natural world like a painter, and it’s clear how that impacts his work.

“Here in Oxford, there's a trail I go running on. It's about a six-mile trail through the woods, which I go to fairly regularly (to observe) not just the landscape of the woods and the kudzu and the hills and the valleys and the rises and falls, but also the different times of day,” he says, noting “how a landscape in the natural world takes on its own characteristics, depending on if it's seven in the morning or seven in the evening, if it's December the 2nd or if it's May the 4th or if it's August the 6th. You get that range of a feeling and mood, which I think really helps drive me through writing and creating landscapes.”

Keal and Burdean must descend into the basement of a nearby church cellar and retrieve something — they’ll know what it is when they see it, they’re told — and once they deliver it, they’ll receive their pay. Naturally, it’s nowhere near that easy.

“Early on as a writer, I was very influenced by Larry Brown (a fellow Oxford novelist, sadly deceased), and what I got from Larry was this process he calls ‘sandbagging,’” Smith says. “He would say, ‘I’m going to pile as much on my characters as I possibly could to see how they would respond, to see if they could take it. So that’s how I cut my teeth, and that’s how I still do it. And there are moments when I stop and think, ‘Man, I hope they can get through this … and, oh by the way, what if they can’t?’”

And brother, the sandbags that Smith loads onto his characters are backbreaking. The biblical imagery swirls as the dread mounts, and the line between what’s real and what’s nightmare starts to blur. That’s all by ingenious, devilish design.

“To me, that’s what’s interesting about characters, because it’s what’s interesting about people,” he says. “Nobody gives a shit what kind of person you are when everything's going right, but let something go wrong, let two things go wrong, let three or four things go wrong, let something really bad happen, and that's when you have a tendency to find out about yourself and find out about people around you.”

I always hate giving away even the faintest hints of a novel’s plot — you really ought to discover them for yourself — so I’ll just say that Burdean, Keal and the people they gather along the way end up in their own special kind of hell — and you find yourself rooting for them to find a way out, wondering how in the world they will.

“There have been moments in Armor, but also in other novels, where I knew what was coming for the character, but I knew there was no way around it, and I felt bad about it 50 pages before it happened,” Smith says. “I knew how this was going to end, but it would be a mistake to pull back on that impulse for the sake of taking it easy or trying to please some audience that may not even be there when you get done with the novel. It's going to sound strange, going into the dark is really part of the fun for me.”

Lay Your Armor Down is part of the larger tapestry that Smith is creating, a vision of the South that owes as much to gospel music and the feel of a forest at twilight as it does to Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor … all of it shot through with the maddening contradictions that permeate the region.

“Growing up in small towns and small churches, I was at a pretty early age when I began to realize that the things I heard on Sunday morning didn’t exactly sync up with the things I heard from the same people Monday through Saturday,” he says. “I have a love-hate relationship with Mississippi. I always will. It can be a beautiful, charming, warm, accepting place. And then some of those same people in certain company can be very hateful and intolerant and willing to maintain a status quo that makes them comfortable.”

He points to Faulkner’s famous quote about the Magnolia State: “To understand the world, one must first understand a place Mississippi.” “I always wondered what that meant,” he says, “and then a few years ago I realized what Faulkner was trying to say is, you have no prayer of understanding the world, because you will certainly never understand Mississippi.

“But I stay because of the reasons that endear it to me,” he continues, “and I stay because of the reasons that don’t endear it to me because I want to be part of change, and I want to be part of making things better for everybody. I think the easiest thing to do would be to run away. You can't get hurt by something you don’t love, right? So being hurt by Mississippi tells you that I love it. I love it.”

So what can one person do? Simple. Speak up.

“Quite honestly, I think one of the biggest things you can be is a voice that people hear,” he says. He points to an article he penned for the Bitter Southerner back in 2016 called “The United States of Mississippi,” in which he called — with the prescience of someone who’s seen it all before — how the country at large would soon find itself mired in the contradictions and disgraces that have roiled Mississippi for decades.

“That ruffled a lot of feathers, but also, I got more emails from that piece from people saying, ‘Thank you for speaking up. It makes me feel good to know there are people out there with larger voices who believe these things and think this way,’” he says. “I think there's a lot of people sitting around who do feel very hopeless about things sometimes, but if they hear someone like me speak up in a piece … I wrote a piece about the Confederate flag being on the state flag of Mississippi too, when we were working to get that thing off. I got all the typical ‘If you don't like it then leave’ emails, but I also got twice as many thank you for saying that.”

The first step, Smith believes, is making people realize they’re not alone.

“Nothing that I write is going to swing the vote in Mississippi,” he says. “But if I write something and if I just maintain a voice and people like me do the same, I think it’s comforting to others who feel the same way and are working toward the same things, to know that there are other people like them. That’s where I think my role is, just to continue to be supportive of things that equal the playing field, that help create empathy, that help show tolerance. Because that's the place I want my kids to live. Maybe others will find comfort in it like they have before, because there's more of us than we think there are.”

Buy “Lay Your Armor Down” anywhere books are sold, like, for instance, the Flashlight & A Biscuit Bookshop, right here:

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Win a signed copy of “Lay Your Armor Down”

Hey, so this is pretty cool … Michael has given us a signed copy of his outstanding book to give away to one of you lucky souls. As with our previous giveaways, the rules are simple — a straight-up lottery, and here’s how you enter:

• “Like” this post up there at the top: 1 entry

• “Share” this post using the link or via social media: 1 entry

• Comment below with the scariest late-night drive you’ve ever done: 2 entries

And that’s it! Get to liking, sharing and commenting!

Congrats to the winner of Will Leitch’s new book Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride: Josh Colvin, whose podcast “American Miles” is quite good, and not just because I’ve been a guest on it. Check it out!

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Song of the Week: “Dog and Wolf,” Michael Farris Smith & The Smokes

So here’s a new one for us: the actual artist who created the Song of the Week giving us the background on where it all came from. “Dog and Road” is off Lostville, the six-song EP from Michael Farris Smith & The Smokes that dropped last year. Here’s the story:

“In Desperation Road, I referred to the twilight hour as the hour between ‘dog’ and ‘wolf,’ and it always just kind of stuck with me,” Smith says. “And I was just strumming through this story of a mama sitting on the porch swing watching her kids play, and she’s worn out. She’s ready to give up, she’s ready to call it and just get in her car and start driving and never look back.

“And then something good happens, and (she realizes) life is this balance of, things aren’t always good, things aren’t always bad. They’re usually right in the middle somewhere. And there’s that dog-and-wolf, that transformative hour where you’re right in the middle of both of those things. So, you know, jump to the chorus and there we go.”

The song has a loose, Let It Bleed-era Stonesy vibe to it, and that’s by design. “I wanted it to have a little giddy-up,” Smith says. “I wanted it to be a guitar song. And when we play it live, we’ve got three guitars going on, and it’s a pretty fun song to play.”

Find “Dog and Wolf” and every other song we’ve recommended at the official Flashlight & A Biscuit playlist, which splits the difference between Dog and Wolf:

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That’ll do it for this time around, friends. Have a fine week and we’ll see you right back here soon …

—Jay
Land Cat, Georgia

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This is issue #164 of Flashlight & A Biscuit. Check out all the past issues right here. Feel free to email me with your thoughts, tips and advice. If you’re new around here, jump right to our most-read stories, or check out some of our recent hits:

• Home Turn, our new show for NASCAR Studios, is right here for you to watch:

• Talking with Will Leitch on the occasion of his new novel

• Win the lottery, kick a deputy: The American Dream!

• Is the Kentucky Derby doomed?

• Dispatch from Augusta: Azaleas, green jackets, pimento cheese n’ such

• Our first documentary, on the famous Rama Jama’s diner in Tuscaloosa, Alabama

• What does “Flashlight & A Biscuit” mean, anyway?

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