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Dubray Review

Once a practising doctor and now a practising junkie, Doc patches up stabbings and gunshot wounds and performs illegal abortions on the backstreets of San Antonio. He’s haunted and taunted by the ghost of Hank Williams, having administered Hank a fatal shot of morphine on the night he died. Into Doc’s life comes Graciela, a young Mexican girl with healing powers that are both physical and spiritual. The neighbourhood begins to change: junkies kick the habit and prostitutes quit town to start a new life. Add into this mix a mad Irish priest hell-bent on rescuing Graciela and everybody’s lives are changed forever. Steve Earle’s novel is written with all the poetry and passion of his songs, helping us to understand the desperate people who are trapped outside the law. Redemption isn’t given; it’s earned.

Matthew Ziruk, Dubray Books Galway

Description

Doc Ebersole lives with the ghost of Hank Williams - not just in the figurative sense, not just because Doc was one of the last people to see him alive, and not just because Doc is rumoured to have given Hank the final morphine dose that killed him. In 1963, ten years after Hank's death, Doc is himself wracked by addiction. Having lost his licence to practise medicine, his morphine habit isn't as easy to support as it used to be. So he lives in a rented room in the red-light district on the south side of San Antonio, performing abortions and patching up the odd knife or gunshot wound. But when Graciela, a young Mexican immigrant, appears in the neighbourhood in search of Doc's services, miraculous things begin to happen. Graciela sustains a wound on her wrist that never heals, yet she heals others with the touch of her hand. Everyone she meets is transformed for the better, except, maybe, for Hank's angry ghost - who isn't at all pleased to see Doc doing well.A brilliant excavation of an obscure piece of music history and a marvellous novel in its own right, Steve Earle's "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" is a ballad of regret and redemption, and of the ways in which we remake ourselves and our world through the smallest of miracles.

Reviews

"Steve Earle brings to his prose the same authenticity, poetic spirit, and cinematic energy he projects in his music. I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive is like a dream you can't shake, offering beauty and remorse, redemption in spades" Patti Smith "... a doctor, a Mexican girl, an Irish priest, the ghost of Hank Williams, and JFK the day before he dies. This subtle and dramatic book is the work of a brilliant songwriter who has moved from song to orchestral ballad with astonishing ease" Michael Ondaatje "A rich, raw mix of American myth and hard social reality, of faith and doubt, always firmly rooted in a strong sense of character" Charles Frazier "Steve Earle writes like a shimmering neon angel." Kinky Friedman "With this book Earle seems to have provided as good an explanation as any for the morbid appeal of country music. To devotees such as Doc, (Hank) Williams's songs are a kind of cosmic sponge, capable of absorbing any amount of human misery before pouring it all back "in that heartrending wail that got down in your bones like a cold wet day". And though the novel comes no closer to establishing the facts of Hank Williams's death, it certainly reveals a good deal of truth behind it" -- Alfred Hickling Guardian