What would you do to make sure your child had the best treatment available if she was stricken with Leukemia? Would you take on a second or a third job? Could you swallow your pride? What would you be able to put up with?
Don’t ask me those same questions. You don’t want to hear the answers. Lyle, the main character in Gil Miller’s novella Hillbilly Hustle, faces those same challenging questions. His choices bring some questionable results, leading into a domino effect of terrible outcomes. But hey, a father does what he has to so his children have the chance to grow up and make their own terrible decisions.
After a delivery gets hijacked, he realizes he may have stepped into something he can’t get cleaned off his shoes. These circumstances thrust him into a world he’s not familiar with…but the money is good, and he’s going to need a lot of it to help save his daughter’s life.
How bad can cooking meth be? Sure, it’s dangerous. It puts you in contact with all sorts of unsavory people you wouldn’t otherwise invite to a family picnic some Sunday afternoon. But damn it, the bills are getting paid. What’s the worst that could happen?
Hillbilly Hustle is the prequel to the world Miller set up with his opening book in the Rural Empire series. It’s not a world I knew anything about. This isn’t your typical gangster milieu. There are no skyscrapers. What there are a lot of are is trees. Some people without much frame of reference call the middle part of the United States of America the flyover states.
That is perfectly fine with the culture in this book. They hope you don’t notice them. Turn your head and keep on walking. Don’t mind the rundown trailers and pickup trucks seemingly outnumbering the people. That’s exactly what they want you to see. No overdressed people walking milesd and miles of concrete sidewalks. No urban sprawl with skies so lit up at night you can’t see the stars. No hour-long commutes to and from work.
I’m impressed with this world. I’ve lived in some of the largest and greatest cities in the world. I’ve also had the pleasure of living in rural places where the weekly paper is half-filled with news about which family had which guests some Wednesday afternoon while they were shelling peas on their front porch.
The world of Hillbilly Hustle smells real. It’s not some make-believe world you see in gangster flicks or crime thrillers on the silver screen. It has a table covered with Girl Scout cookies outside the Walmart entrance. It has a family of four standing at the offramp begging for enough to cover their fuel to the next state over. It has people wearing wornout jeans, a t-shirt with a beer logo, and a pair of no-name tennis shoes.
That’s what I loved about this book. It is real. Crime doesn’t just happen in a metropolis numbering well over a million people. It happens next door if you live in any population center where people exist. Every cop doesn’t have to be corrupt and dirty. Every criminal doesn’t have to be a misunderstood person of incredible benevolence. These are real people in Hillbilly Hustle. They could be your brother who got mixed up in the wrong crowd and made some poor decisions. It could be your next door neighbor who keeps his problems to himself but needed to make something right by doing something wrong.
It could be you.
I look forward to exploring this world Miller has created deeper. I look forward to reading about the people I see everyday as I live and breath in my small town among the flyover states.
