In Jim Grimsley's remarkable first novel, Winter Birds , Danny Crell tells himself his own story, and in doing so illuminates the heartbreaking story of his father's violent tyranny over his mother, his sister, and his three younger brothers. The novel begins on Thanksgiving in rural North Carolina in a broken-down cottage the Crell children have nicknamed "The Circle House." Ellen Crell's attempts at a family meal are thwarted and finally disastrously ruined when Bobjay draws her into a violent quarrel. It leads to a chase wherein Bobjay is the hunter, Ellen the prey, and their five children are caught in between. Winter Birds is a haunting, unforgettable portrait of an American family shattered by violence, and of the lengths a woman will go to keep her family whole. The surface simplicity of this first novel-the story of a young boy who survives a violent Thanksgiving quarrel between his parents-masks an amazing voyage of self-discovery. Danny Crell comes from what must be the apotheosis of the dysfunctional family: his father, who has lost an arm in an industrial accident, is a mean and frequent drunk, and his mother appears to be a doormat for her husband's abuse. Danny and his baby brother are hemophiliacs, and metaphors of blood and bleeding permeate the book. Grimsley tells the story in the second person, with the narrator, who seems to be the grown-up Danny, offering sentences like this: "You brush bits of powdered grass from your fingers." At first, this device seems stilted and artificial, but as the novel gains momentum, one is swept into the story, and it almost feels as if the narrator is addressing the reader directly-and, occasionally, accusingly. Grimsley has created a harrowing southern gothic world, reminiscent of Faulkner or Caldwell. A remarkable first novel. The violence is just half the story. The other half is the poetry that infuses Winter Birds , and it only intensifies the terror. Danny remembers the hemophiliac bleeding that once brought him to the threshold of death, and how the blank promis of peace enticed him. The snow on that troubled Thanksgiving is the silent snow, secret snow of annihilation. And so his mother fights not just to protect him from the fury at home but to pull him back from the precipice that, she senses, something in him is longing to approach. The title of the novel comes from the songbirds-wrens, starlings, cardinals-that Danny's brothers are out killing with BBs at the beginning of the book. The Crell children are harmless, lyrical little creatures, too. Some of this material may sound familiar. A monster of a father, a steadfast mother, a white-trash Southern landscape viewed from a gay perspective, with the bitterness of memory but also with unwavering, unsentimental love-all this, of course, is Dorothy Allison territory. I can't think of a solider tribute to offer Grimsley than to say that he doesn't suffer in the comparison. Jim Grimsley's first novel is a painfully intense rendering of a family forced to endure a life harsh enough to nullify any threat posed by the possibility of dying and going to hell. The novel is unrelievedly grim, but Grimsley's genius lies in his ability to draw us so deeply into the narrative that we keep turning the pages even when we know that each holds nothing but the promise of more pain. Danny Crell, an 8-year-old hemophiliac, is the narrator of this domestic horror story, his experience made all the more vivid by means of an unusual "second person" narrative voice that creates the impression of an older Danny reaching back to tell his younger self the story. Like Greek tragedy, Winter Birds moves inexorably from its hypnotic opening to its final, chilling revelation, leaving the reader stunned, exhausted, and wonder-struck. -- The Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 6, 1994 In Jim Grimsley's remarkable first novel, Winter Birds , Danny Crell tells himself his own story, and in doing so illuminates the heartbreaking story of his father's violent tyranny over his mother, his sister, and his three younger brothers. The novel begins on Thanksgiving in rural North Carolina in a broken-down cottage the Crell children have nicknamed "The Circle House." Ellen Crell's attempts at a family meal are thwarted and finally disastrously ruined when Bobjay draws her into a violent quarrel. It leads to a chase wherein Bobjay is the hunter, Ellen the prey, and their five children are caught in between. Winter Birds is a haunting, unforgettable portrait of an American family shattered by violence, and of the lengths a woman will go to keep her family whole. Jim Grimsley Jim Grimsley was born in 1955 in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and like his character, Danny Crell, moved around a lot with his family, following his father from job to job. In an essay about his writing, called "True Fiction," Grimsley says, "We were always poor, moving from house to house, with our every move the subject of discussion by our neighbors i