Book review: ‘Backseat Saints'

That would include Atlanta author Joshilyn Jackson’s latest, “Backseat Saints,” a sizzling chunk of Southern Gothic with hardly a chapter that doesn’t feature a firearm, a beating, a desperate getaway or steamy sex (not necessarily in that order).

But it’s not only the nail-biting, sinuous plot -- which circles back to Jackson’s first book, “Gods in Alabama,” to recycle characters and events -- that gives the book, to quote one of its characters, “a hundred different kinds of pure, naked crazy.”

It’s the way Jackson writes, like a woman whose hair is on fire, batting at the flames with one hand while scribbling like mad with the other. Her characters are the same way. Their flaws are not minor, any more than a bullet in a gun is harmless. These people are damaged badly at best, nursing deep hurts that hiss like snakes on every page.

One of them is Rose Mae Lolley from “Gods,” now living in Amarillo as Ro, the demure, sweet-tempered wife of a handsome batterer named Thom Grandee: “I was a good wife most times, but I was made like nesting dolls. I had something bad, some other girl, buried way down in the meat of me. That inside girl was the thing that needed to be hit, that deserved it, and I called it to her.”

Throughout five years of marriage, Ro has put up with beatings so severe that a nurse at the local ER has warned her that sooner or later, “he’ll send you here in a zipper bag.”

Ro has learned to hide her bruises, avoid close friendships and watch her mouth to avoid triggering her husband’s temper. Her only ally is a neighbor whose advice to Ro about leaving Thom falls on deaf ears -- until a ride to the airport, where Ro encounters a fortuneteller who predicts a chilling future: Kill Thom or end up killed.

Ro knows it’s true. “I’ll see you dead before I’ll let you leave me,” Thom has told her more than once. But when she tries to take the gypsy’s advice, she comes up against her love for her husband and the sex that glues their bad halves together.

Thom’s moods careen from normal to deadly without warning: One minute he’s her hot, lovable husband; the next, he’s a murderous jock. She's too busy putting out flames to put together a breakout plan.

That will be up to Rose Mae Lolley -- the wildly funny, dead serious buried girl.

A fierce survivor of a motherless childhood with an abusive father, Rose Mae emerges to save Ro, but not without an internal war that Jackson depicts through a nimble first- and third-person juggling act: As Rose Mae takes the reins, Ro weakens: “I didn’t feel like Thom’s Ro. I felt cornered, and I felt Rose Mae rising. ... Her day would come.”

When it does, the race is on to outrun Thom or fulfill the prophecy of the airport fortuneteller -- a gypsy that Rose Mae recognized from the start as her long-lost mother, who will risk everything to rescue her.

For anyone who’s ever wondered why an abused woman doesn’t “just leave” her abuser, Jackson makes clear that it’s no easier for Ro to get free of Thom Grandee than it was for a slave to skip town before the Civil War.

She’ll need a new identity, an escape route, and a destination where Thom can’t follow. She’ll need every Catholic saint in the back seat of her getaway car. There are false starts and wrong turns. And there’s Thom, never far behind. It’s desperado-style, heart-thumping joyriding at its best.

Trust me: You won’t even miss it if nobody gets shot.

Author appearances

7 p.m. June 8, $5 for members, $10 for nonmembers. The Lit Center at the Margaret Mitchell House, 990 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-814-4150, www.margaretmitchellhouse.com/cms/Author+Programs/246.html

7 p.m. June 10, FoxTale Book Shoppe, 105 E. Main St., Woodstock. 770-516-9989, www.foxtalebookshoppe.com/