Crime Noir / Southern Noir
What the Creek Said
Combining Megan Abbott + Cormac McCarthy | Dare Me + Child of God
Synopsis
In a dying hill town in east Tennessee, a group of teenage girls orbits their fierce leader, Jolene, who has taken an interest in a strange boy living alone in a creek-bottom shack. What begins as a dare becomes a reckoning with the land, loyalty, and what the girls are willing to become.
Abbott's warm interior feminine noir — desire and violence braided, adolescence as crime scene — collides with McCarthy's cold exterior biblical prose, where landscape is moral condition and violence arrives without announcement. Dare Me's toxic loyalty structures among teenage girls meet Child of God's rural isolation and the person a community has already decided about.
Behind the Story
A discussion between Megan Abbott and Cormac McCarthy
We met at a gas station outside Sneedville, Tennessee, which is the kind of place that exists primarily to mark the distance between somewhere and somewhere else. The pumps had been shut off years ago but the store was open, selling jerky and bait and Coke in glass bottles from a cooler that hummed like a dying animal. Behind the building, a gravel lot sloped down toward a tree line and beyond that, the sound of water. It was early September and the air was thick enough to chew. The light came…
Read the full discussionThe Formula
- Lush, fever-warm prose about female bodies in motion — skin, breath, the physical as power
- Adolescence rendered as a crime scene where loyalty and betrayal are indistinguishable
- Desire braided with violence — wanting and hurting as the same gesture
- Biblical, unpunctuated sentences that move like weather across the page
- Landscape as moral condition — the hills and creek as living, indifferent presences
- Violence that arrives without announcement or apology, matter-of-fact as gravity
- The power hierarchy within a closed group of girls — who leads, who follows, who breaks
- Loyalty that curdles into something dangerous when tested
- The ruthlessness of teenage girls treated with dead seriousness
- Rural isolation as incubator for what civilization refuses to see
- A figure the community has already decided about — judgment preceding evidence
- The gap between what a place claims to be and what it harbors
Reader Reviews
A productive collision of Abbott's feminine interiority with McCarthy's masculine landscape, and the story is smart enough to let neither dominate. The gendering of the prose itself shifts between sections -- the creek-bottom passages are McCarthy (declarative, paratactic, geological), while the scenes of girlhood hierarchy are Abbott (interior, body-aware, desire-coded). This formal oscillation mirrors the thematic split between Jolene's two worlds. The Garlan figure functions as Child of God's Lester Ballard reimagined: not as grotesque but as the community's projected grotesquerie. Making the actual violence come from the girls rather than from him inverts the expected southern noir trajectory. The narrator's confession of complicity -- 'I did nothing because doing nothing was what Jolene required' -- is the story's moral center and its darkest line.
73 found this helpful
The McCarthy influence is handled with more confidence than most attempts I encounter -- the unpunctuated dialogue, the geological prose, the land as indifferent witness. These are not pastiche but genuine structural choices. The Abbott side is less assured. The interiority is present but occasionally tells where it should enact: 'I was being unmade' is a thesis statement, not a dramatization. The strongest passages are the landscape sections, particularly the karst metaphor, which earns its recurrence. The IGA parking lot confrontation is the piece's best scene -- compressed, visual, genuinely noir. But the reflective ending softens what should remain hard.
61 found this helpful
This does something genuinely interesting with gendered violence. The crime here isn't the punch behind the IGA -- it's the entire apparatus of girlhood that Jolene has built, and Bree's complicity in it. Making the narrator queer (that 'I loved her' in the second paragraph does a lot of quiet work) reframes the loyalty-as-desire dynamic that Dare Me circles around. And the Garlan thread is sharp: the community's pre-judgment of a boy from the creek bottom is recognizably the same mechanism as the girls' hierarchy, just wearing different clothes. My one reservation: the final paragraphs lean into retrospective wisdom that slightly domesticates the preceding violence. The fist-closing image is strong, but 'the holding was the only thing there ever was' wraps the bow a beat too neatly for a story this rough.
57 found this helpful
Lord, this one sits in your chest. The creek-bottom setting is Tennessee down to the bone -- I could smell the woodsmoke and the wet limestone. But what got me is Bree's voice, that mix of looking back with grown-up eyes and still feeling everything at fifteen-year-old voltage. Jolene is terrifying because she's not a monster, she's a girl who figured out how power works before anyone taught her the word for it. And Garlan with his bird carvings -- I wanted to scream at these people. The town decided what he was and the girls decided what he was and nobody asked the creek. Best thing I've read this month.
48 found this helpful
The voice is the asset here -- Bree's narration has a retrospective gravity that never tips into sentimentality, and the McCarthy-influenced landscape prose gives the story a weight that most contemporary southern noir achieves only through violence. Smart choice to make the violence small and social rather than spectacular. Jolene is a compelling figure precisely because the text refuses to psychologize her from the outside; we only get Bree's obsessive reading of her surfaces. Commercially, this sits in a productive space between literary fiction and genre -- the Abbott readership and the McCarthy readership don't overlap much, but the readers who live in that gap will find this and remember it.
45 found this helpful
The sentences work. Not all of them, but enough. 'The trees grew up twisted and grabbed at the rock with roots like fingers' -- that is earned. The dialogue is stripped bare in a way that respects the characters' relationship to speech: these are people for whom silence is the native tongue. The McCarthy rhythms do not feel borrowed; they feel inhabited. Where the prose weakens is in the explanatory passages between scenes -- 'This was the knife. The selection.' Tell me less. The karst metaphor carries real structural weight, appearing three times and deepening each time. That is craft.
39 found this helpful
Stayed up reading this twice. The first time for the story, the second time for the sentences. That line about the IGA sign buzzing on dead electricity -- I keep thinking about it. Jolene is one of those characters who walks off the page and into your head and won't leave. And the way the story treats Garlan, never letting you see him except through other people's decisions about him, that's devastating. This is southern noir that actually feels southern, not just noir with a drawl pasted on.
31 found this helpful
Atmospheric work, competently assembled. The Tennessee landscape is rendered with genuine specificity -- the karst topography, the hollers with their own weather systems, the sycamore bark. These are not decorative details but structural elements, and they're deployed with discipline. The central dynamic between the girls has shades of Rendell's early work in how it treats power as a domestic rather than institutional force. Where I'm less persuaded is the narrator's retrospective frame. The adult Bree telling us what the fifteen-year-old Bree felt introduces a distance that occasionally blunts the immediacy. Noir works best in the present tense of its disasters.
29 found this helpful
Good atmosphere but not enough happens. A bunch of girls hang around a pickup truck, one of them visits a weird kid by a creek, somebody snitches, the kid gets hauled off, there's a fight. That's the whole plot. I get that the real story is supposed to be the power dynamics or whatever, but I kept waiting for something to actually go wrong in a way that had consequences. The punch behind the IGA is the only real action scene and it's over in two lines. The writing itself is fine -- some real nice descriptions of the hills.
14 found this helpful