Books: Frances Hunt's Body Shop and Boneyard by Chad Darnell (2024)

"Three months after accidentally shutting down the Southeastern cell of a human body harvesting operation, Frances Hunt is living her best life. She’s opened a senior citizen recreational facility, quit smoking and drinking, and found a new reason to live. But that doesn’t last long. When disaster hits the small town of Liberty, Frances finds herself being hunted by old foes, betrayed by those she trusted and blackmailed by the people she loves. Her only way out is to assemble an unlikely team of misfits and shut down the international ‘body shop.’”

There is a lot more going on here in the continuation from Buying the Farm (and I agree, as someone points out late in the book “You couldn’t write this shit. You need, like, a chalkboard and flow charts just to keep up”), as things get more absurd as each page flies by. The characters are really fleshed out, which is the strong point of the tale. As wild and sometimes unbelievable the story gets, Frances and the rest still shine and you feel their pain. 

As noted, a lot of stuff happens in what amounts to just a few days, with the lighting and fire damage done to the Baptist Church being at the center of it all. On hindsight, even in such a small town as Liberty is described, the damage done by the rain storm would’ve gotten both local and national news interested almost instantly. Also, it seems surprising that the death count would’ve peaked some people’s interest long before the events of this book. Liberty is seemly a cousin to Stephen King’s Derry, a town that contains more cruelty than any other place –a town where a lot of horrible things happen and yet the people who are born there, who live and work there seem to exist in the ether of indifference. Liberty contains very religious people, but it’s also clearly a place where blinders are put on the eyes of the people, who only care about their petty and small problems and their secrets.

While Frances Hunt remains a black comedy, it’s not as laugh out loud as the first book, though the book is still pretty funny. As author Darnell noted in the previous book, he tried to sell this idea as a movie or a TV series. And this second book is seemly set up as continuing story over what might be a thirteen episode season. He also sets up more plots for a third tale, which appears to be due sometime in 2025.

In the end, a still enjoyable tale filled with almost real-life characters set against a plot that probably does happen in the real world as well. Which is very disturbing.

Books: Buying the Farm By Chad Darnell (2022)

“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.”