"Fancy Gap both upholds and upends the stereotypes [about Appalachia], a balance made possible as a result of the way Jones uses language and his cast of characters. . . . [It] is a startling study of intergenerational trauma. Each generation of the Fuquay family bears the scars of the one that came before it, and, without spoiling anything, I can tell you the climax involves all the old wounds opening in a satisfying way."
—The Globe and Mail
"With Fancy Gap, Zak Jones has given us an extraordinary novel of strange beauties and horrors. His characters live at the edges of the American experiment—the freaks, the addicts, the criminals and those just simply ravaged by illness—and as the novel builds, taking us through a world of drugs, religion, fringe politics and frayed family bonds, it gathers hallucinatory power."
—Phil Klay, National Book Award–winning author of Uncertain Ground and Redeployment
“Much of the novel’s power comes from the sensuous exactitude with which Jones’ narrator renders the action. There are some truly ecstatic images at work in his prose. . . . [The] love that animates Fancy Gap also makes divinity look insufficient by comparison.”
—The Miramichi Reader
"In god's name, Amen. Zak Jones has created his own backwoods revival with Fancy Gap. Here is a novel that clicks along like an empty cartridge on a stolen military pistol, a story that alternates between the calm energy of an oxy-induced stupor and the frantic fire of methamphetamine. Jones brings us right onto the bench seat of a truck hell-bent for glory on the Blue Ridge Parkway. But no one can hear the angels sing when survival is all you can pray for and the definition of family gets blurred by opioids and then drowned in a carcinogenic river along with the American dream."
—Conor Kerr, award-winning author of Prairie Edge and Avenue of Champions
"This gritty debut novel serves as an intimate look at [the] beautiful but desperate region between the borders of Virginia and North Carolina. . . . Jones’s striking prose never wastes words, sharply creating deep, sometimes unlikable but mostly sympathetic characters. . . . [The] stark depiction of desperate poverty and the drug trade may remind readers of Daniel Woodrell’s 2006 novel Winter’s Bone."
—Winnipeg Free Press
"The author’s Appalachian roots authenticate his depiction of the land and those living on it. . . . Complex characters evolve in compelling ways. Their hardships attack readers across a bridge of emotive prose, there’s no escaping it. But it’s not all grit and sadness, there is also love and redemption—more rewarding as the reader must earn it. Plus, the book is laced with understated wit, . . . Fancy Gap’s exploration of intergenerational trauma evokes the ghost of Faulkner. The pains of abuse and abandonment are passed on as poisonous heirlooms."
—The New Quarterly
"Fancy Gap blends rich style with profound sincerity as Zak Jones, in a story as attuned to pain as it is to beauty, delineates the loves and obsessions of his characters. The breadth of influence visible here—from Mary Gaitskill to Randall Kenan to Daniel Woodrell—makes the territory of Fancy Gap Jones’s own."
—Naben Ruthnum, author of Helpmeet and A Hero of Our Time
"Fancy Gap, like its author, is a true original—a work of personal integrity, profound insight and deep feeling. Rarely does a first novel so incisively and curiously, in such exquisite and evocative language, delve into questions about faith and family with such a boundless capacity for empathy and care. This is a special book by a writer we should all be reading for some time."
—Pasha Malla, author of All You Can Kill and Kill the Mall
"Fancy Gap is a beautifully written, profound look at two brothers forced into impossible, inevitable decisions by traumas beyond their understanding—grief, addiction, and the unyielding demands of capitalism. A requiem for lives that can’t be lived. An empathetic portrait of family in end-stage America. . . . A remarkable debut."
—Michael Melgaard, author of Not That Kind of Place and Pallbearing
"Fancy Gap offers a chilling look at how ordinary people can find faith yet lose their way."
—Literary Review of Canada
