I so enjoyed Winter's Bone (see review here), that I set out to read another Woodrell forthwith. In Give Us A Kiss: A Country Noir, Doyle Redmond, a published but unknown author, leaves California in a Volvo stolen from his unfaithful wife, to return to his native Missouri. He sees his parents who dispatch him to find his brother, Smoke, and to convince him to turn himself in on outstanding arrest warrants in Kansas City. Doyle finds Smoke deep in the woods near their hometown of West Table, in the Missouri Ozarks along the Arkansas border, cultivating a cash crop of marijuana. Needing money to finish his next novel, Doyle pitches in on tending and harvesting the crop, a dangerous job due to a long-standing feud between the Redmonds and another hillbilly family. The perhaps autobiographical Give Us a Kiss is both more country and more noir than Winter's Bone. Woodrell's use of language is rougher and the plot is grittier and bloodier. But, I am more convinced after reading Give Us A Kiss, that Woodrell is doing something unlike any other current author in telling heretofore untold tales of the harsh realities of life in contemporary rural America. Brilliant, albeit disturbing.