The Gift of Gab

Randall Ivey’s latest collection of stories takes his readers back to the apocryphal Compton County, South Carolina, a Deep South haven a-swarm with a myriad of characters from different walks of life, with different points of view, and who sing with their own individual voices.

There’s Mrs. Jenny deGraffenreid, whose Methodist goodness of heart leads her to commit a most unfortunate act of charity; Simona Diggs, who attends funerals so that she may squirrel away the food from the bereaved until she is stopped by pranksters; Debbie Lynn Fulton, whose romantic woes rise to such a pitch she winds up ruining her uncle’s funeral; Rusty Flowers, whose love of glitter puts him in backwoods peril; Otto Runnels, who suffers bullying at the hands of older boys before finally striking back; and Jessie McMillan, who, upon discovering her husband’s infidelity, carries out her retribution in a most public way.

These and other characters await readers in tales comic, pathetic, and even macabre as only a master storyteller from the South can tell them.