-You can tell McClanahan feels something when he writes and when he lives. He wants you to feel something too.---The Huffington Post

I walked up to the side of the mountain like I used to do when I was a little boy. I looked out over Rainelle and watched it shine. The coal trucks and the logging trucks were still gunning it through town. They were still clear cutting the mountains and cutting the coal from the ground. Then I heard my mother calling and it was like I was a child again.

Beginning to read Hill William is like tuning into a blues station at 4:00 a.m....

"McClanahan's prose is miasmic, dizzying, repetitive. A rushing river of words that reflects the chaos and humanity of the place from which he hails. He writes in an elliptical fever dream so contagious that slowing down is not an option. It would be like putting a doorstop in front of a speeding train. This is not a book you savor. It is one you inhale." -The New York Times

"Part memoir, part hillbilly history, part dream, McClanahan embraces humanity with all its grit, writing tenderly of criminals and outcasts, family and the blood ties that bind us."
--Interview...