“Welcome to Liberty, Georgia. Population 2,424. Sweet old Ruth Chambers passed away after a lengthy illness, so that number might be off by one or two. The sign hasn’t been updated in a while. Everybody knows everybody and their business. There’s a town square and two traffic lights. One on the way into town and one on the way out. Nothing bad ever happens here. Frances Hunt is at her breaking point. She has a hellraising teenaged son and a mother, who is nearly eighty going on eighteen. Thanks to a failed chicken house business, Frances and her mother are about to lose the farm, which has been in the family since the Civil War. With mounting medical bills, a surprise grandchild on the way, and foreclosure looming, Frances discovers a new opportunity to harvest. And it’s going to cost her an arm and a leg to save it. An opportunity in which she (her mother, and her senior citizen friends) could make a killing... selling dead body parts on the black market.”
Chad
Darnell’s Buying the Farm is a hoot of a black comedy, a sometimes dark (but
mostly hilarious) gothic southern tale of a dysfunctional family who accidentally find
themselves over their heads and, well, God appears to answer some their
prayers. What makes this book work –because there is some violence, a lot of
death, and some questionable morals- is the characters are so well drawn, so
developed, and so damn funny, that even the most conservative people wouldn’t
mind hanging out with them.
Frances
is not a great mother to Kevin, nor a great daughter to her mother Bird. But
she is smart and able to work on her feet, make quick decisions and understands
how the universe works. She sees opportunities, despite the gruesomeness of the
job and like all mothers, will do what she can to help her son and family (as
Hector calls them, Baby Dexter and The Golden Girls). There are a lot of twists
and turns here, and the book runs fast and furious, and I would be remiss not
mention how many times I laughed out loud here. This is just a delightful fun
ride.
Thanks
the heavens, there is a sequel…
According
to the author, he pitched a pilot, then called BODY FARM, to Hazy Mills, a production
company in Los Angeles run by Sean Hayes and Todd Milliner. “The day we were
set to pitch to the studio, the Writers' Strike began. Eight months later, we
began pitching the show all over LA, but the notes came back, ‘we're not
looking for shows with women.’ ‘We're not looking for shows old women.’ ‘We're
not looking for shows set in the South.’ ‘We're not looking for shows with an
anti-hero.’ Every few years we would take the project back out, and it would
draw some interest with the powers-that-be asking, ‘could the characters be
younger? and ‘could it be soapier?’ ‘What if it's set in Chicago!?’ The story,
set in the Deep South, is about four women (of a certain age), who accidentally
fall into selling dead body parts on the black market. So no, they can't be
younger, soapier, or in Chicago. We were set to take it back out again in March 2020, and the world shut down the
day we were expected back to the studio. After a year and a half with no
movement, I decided to take my ladies and tell their story in book form. The
resulting novel became known as BUYING THE FARM.”
