Burden Book

Burden, a twenty-one-year-old grocery store clerk in Walterboro, South Carolina, has two things on his mind: suicide and sex. Suicide because of overwhelming guilt for his role in the death of a beloved cousin. Sex because if you live in a small Southern town stuffed with unfulfilled wives and their vengeful men, it's got to be a great way to go.

Of course with such a plan there are bound to be complications: second thoughts, husbands who won't take the bait, and most surprising of all to Burden himself, the return to town of the one woman it might be worth staying alive for.

Burden's women are unforgettable: Maude, whose kneecaps can make a man fall to the floor in a swoon and married to the town's doctor, a much older man not possibly capable of living up to those kneecaps or the woman who goes with them. Pru, whose passion for afternoon lovemaking is close to insatiable, and whose long-haul truckdriving husband Eugene is rarely on the scene to accommodate. Then there's Jo, a different creature altogether-the woman Burden might truly love but who he seems to have let slip from his grasp.

Readers of Clyde Edgerton and Charles Portis will find themselves happily at home in this lyrical and funny novel with the feckless hero who keeps trying to end it all...but can't.

Publishers Weekly

Death during sex is the unusual method of suicide chosen by a troubled protagonist named Burden in Walters's debut novel, an engaging but flawed coming-of-age story about a young man whose death wish is occasioned by guilt. Devastated by his involvement in a shooting incident with a deranged local farmer that takes the life of his cousin Peedie, 21-year-old Burden decides to commit suicide by seducing housewives in the hopes that an enraged husband will gun him down. His job as a delivery boy in a small South Carolina town offers plenty of romantic access, and before long Burden finds himself sweating up the sheets with a doctor's wife as well as a sexy former high school crush. In the process, though, he torpedoes a budding relationship with Jo Simon, the girl of his dreams, who ends up leaving town to become a nurse. Walters's talent for storytelling is noteworthy, and he has a knack for writing energetic scenes that capture steamy sex. But he stretches the thin sexual conceit well beyond the breaking point, and the inevitable confrontation with a jealous husband is as predictable as the mawkish, overwrought series of scenes in which Burden tries to come to terms with his loss while attempting to patch up his relationship with Simon. The final tally of the book's flaws and strengths ends up a wash, a solid signal that Walters has some work to do to fully realize his literary potential. Agent, John Talbot. Film rights to Miramax. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.