Dear Reader,
I intend for The Drip to be a formal allegory of judgment and punishment in Southern fiction’s oldest discussion, class critique, told from unexpected points of view, not the least of which is yours. The setting? Two winters living in a shed in the Smoky Mountain foothills. A construction site. An unconventional crew and the relationships that made the home-build possible.
In The Drip, the dialogue removes the space between you and the characters. You are the witness and the judge, and as in Billy Budd, the verdict is yours to carry. You and the characters will build an off-grid home, from the first cleared trail through land virtually untouched in modernity yet steeped in history. It starts with a mortar-free, stacked-stone Roman arch bridge and progresses to a vast solar installation and every modern convenience. It ends each day in a shed, in the search for a contractor, a well company, and a sense of belonging in this hostile environment. Black bears, bobcats, coyotes, and a territorial owl already call the holler home, and they were here first.
Michael Gullo
The Shelf
Reviews
The Drip is experimental in form, and it has no like in the canon, except perhaps in the how-to books that teach the importance of a narrator and the guidelines for handling dialogue. The Drip breaks nearly every one of those rules on purpose and makes that breaking a formal component of the allegory.
Manuel Puig, William Gaddis, and Henry Green worked in this form. Puig kept it to two voices, Gaddis let it become chaos, and Green came closest, carrying class entirely in talk. The Drip stands on their shoulders and tries to carry their work forward. Two winters pass in it, and a marriage is lived across the miles on a phone, and both the time and the distance are carried by talk alone. So are place, character, class, and emotion, even the cold, the color, and the smell. With no narrator to sort the voices, the reader becomes the judge that the allegory requires.
Readers meet it differently. Some find the voices right away. Some fight the missing tags for a chapter or two, and some never stop fighting them. Every one of those reactions is welcome here. Say what the book did to you, whether you loved it, hated it, or quit. Especially if you quit. Please tell me where and why.
The Drip is an incomplete first draft of sometimes more ambition than I can support, but I’m trying. All of your input will help. Nothing posted here gets edited or taken down.
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