Thoughts: Fay

First time reading anything by Larry Brown and, despite the fact that I only found Fay to be OK, I'd be willing to try another book by him simply because his writing style is amazing.  Fay does read easily, but the situations and the main character just felt too much like a Lifetime movie and, no offense, but I really wasn't expecting that.

The inside jacket information pretty much tells the entire story:

She's had no education, and you can't call what her father's been trying to give her "love." So at seventeen, Fay Jones leaves home, carrying a purse with half a pack of cigarettes and two dollar bills. She's headed for the bright lights and big times of Biloxi, and even she knows she needs help getting there. But helps not hard to come by when you look like Fay.
There's a highway patrolman who gives her a lift, with a detour to his own place. There are truck drivers who pick her up, no questions asked. There's a crop duster with money for a night or two on the town. There's a strip-joint bouncer who deals on the side. And in the end, there are five dead bodies stacked in Fay's wake.

And that is why I picked the book up in the first place.  I was looking to see just how this uneducated girl could/would end up on some sort of murderous rampage leaving all those bodies in her wake.  Well, I was left hanging on that, since only one of the deaths actually occurred at her own hands.  The prose does make the story very readable, though it rolls along towards an incredibly predictable conclusion.

From what I've gathered, this novel is actually a sort of sequel to one of Brown's earlier works, Joe: A Novel, in which Fay's brother is one of the main characters.  Perhaps reading that first would have given me more sympathy for Fay, but reading this novel stand alone left me rather blah about the entire thing.

Source: My copy of this book was borrowed from my local library