Now this is a good book. Deeply compelling and fearsome, Woodrell's story is set far back in the woods, hills, and valleys of the Ozarks, a place inhabited by the clans who once must have settled there during the first stirrings of the country. Yet the people feel so much older than that - so primitive are they in their bonds of loyalty and their traditions of violence, that the reader is transported to something like mystic antiquity.

At first, I wasn't sure if I liked the style; it seemed a pale version of Cormac McCarthy. But the author won me over. He is not McCarthy, and this book has it's own original voice, a powerful rural poetry. Like many of the works of the 19th century, (think "Return of the Native" or "Adam Bede") the setting of "Winter's Bone" is nearly as important as any of the characters. If you don't like landscape description, this book is not for you. Woodrell excels here: "Coyotes howled past dawn, howled from far crags and ridges and down the valley to the end of the rut road where the school bus stopped. Ree, Sonny, and Harold stood next to the country blacktop that led everywhere, beside white levees the plows had built with scraped-aside snow."

The people feel authentic to me, and their names reek with clannishness: the Dollys, the Haslams, the Bromonts, all the various Miltons. The novel never goes into their history, but I know their forebears were trappers and lumbermen, farmers and fishermen. Now they cook crank. It is a claustrophobic dead-end for the young protagonist, Ree Dolly, whose ethic and courage is both lovely and sad.

I did things backwards by going to see the film first, but ultimately it didn't matter at all. The book is even better than the film.