At first browse, Todd Dills ’ Sons of the Rapture appears easy to classify as part of a new wave of Southern Grotesque. The basic elements are all here: distempered South Carolinian family members struggling under inherited insanity and wealth; underlying racial and sexual tensions seeking to explode; deeply flawed characters willing to perform extreme feats while attempting redemption.

    In fact, Featherproof Books uses “the road to redemption is littered” as the marketing tagline for Sons of the Rapture. The book’s structure itself starts off somewhat reminiscent of Faulkner, the first half using various viewpoints to drive the plot a la As I Lay Dying. One of them is even a “crazy” son character with distorted prose requiring a little interpretation -- though unlike Vardaman, he never claims “my mother is a fish.”Given the obvious overtones, however, the story’s development itself feels more reminiscent of the Beats; but not in a Keroucian search for Zen and the Lost America sense. Rather, Dills’ prose presents hedonistic characters whose winding conversations and confusing decisions recall Richard Brautigan’s Rimbaudian tales or a Burroughs slightly less obsessed with bodily function. The cast of personalities evoke very little empathy from the reader, but are rounded and unpredictable enough to keep us interested.

    The central character, Billy Jones, is a self-indulgent “starving artist” who would be a trust fund kid if not (surprise) estranged from father. He’s moved from South Carolina to Chicago, where he writes, drinks, shoots alley rats, and spends his time with romantic interests and a bisexual Latino block party musician called Artichoke Heart. His father Johnny and his father’s old pals, along with brother Bobby, drive the novel’s surreal Southern scenes with the requisite amount of drunkenness, debauchery, and violence necessary. Dills paints their personalities through first-person prose equal parts homespun rambling and friendly vulgar confession. One character begins his tale, “My mother was a crazy whore,” while another obsesses over a Rapture he’s convinced will leave him behind. A Mexican cowboy named Ariel rounds out the major characters, and provides perspective on an event that no reader would expect after the first half of the novel: a cattle drive.

    Even without a clear-cut protagonist readers can cheer for, Dills inserts an indirect antagonist in Thorpe Storm. In his characterization, Storm will remind some readers of longtime South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. Senator Storm is a longtime enemy of both father and son, who decry his racism and abuses of power while observing his shrewdness. Occasionally, characters also reference an inept president without naming names. Sons of the Rapture is not a political book, however, and the friction between the Johnsons and Thorpe Storm has little to do with politics.

    The plot Dills sets in motion wanders along slowly, allowing the reader to observe characters as they wallow through life and tell stories about other characters to hint at what’s ahead. With such wild characters beginning the novel in varying locations,  forward-thinking readers might quickly come to expect that the story will culminate in a million dollar bash that careens past believability. Dills does not disappoint.