Southern Cross the Dog by Bill Cheng, review The title of this literary debut receives scant explanation within the novel, so it takes some digging to find out that it refers to a Mississippi railroad crossing, long immortalised in blues songs, where the "Southern" line crosses the colloquially known "Yellow Dog" line. Within the story, a devilish dog is also the form taken by a curse, as it stalks a black itinerant called Robert Chatham throughout his misadventures. After his childhood home is destroyed by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, Robert's wanderings take him across a swampy landscape teeming with rapacious land developers, rascally bluesmen, tender-hearted prostitutes, murderous Cajun fur trappers and racist white townsfolk. If the accumulation of Southern Gothic tropes suggests a voodoo reanimation of William Faulkner, that might not be far off the mark. It's startling to discover the novel is written by a young Chinese-American writer from Brooklyn who never set foot in Mississippi until after it was completed. Cheng's acknowledgements pay tribute to a roll-call of Southern bluesmen, and it is clear that his imagination is saturated in their plangent and fatalistic evocations of a vanished world. That world, lovingly reanimated within these pages, is a hypnotic one. Cheng knows how to locate the uncanny folkloric resonance in these impoverished backwoods lives: their dirty bodies, gnawing hunger, tin-roofed shacks, moonshine, jujus and occasionally rapturous song. The description is so pungent it has the power to overturn all preconceived notions about imitation and authenticity. However, there is sometimes an imbalance within a writer's talents. We open with a flinty-eyed entrepreneur springing a pianist out of jail in order to start a blues band, but this promising storyline soon splutters out. Amid desultory shifts in timelines and points of view, the most consistent thread is provided by Robert as he drifts through a series of bleak, half-developed scenarios. The dog chasing him may be imaginary, but the hardships that Robert encounters while running away from it are real and unrelenting. He becomes such a scarred, inscrutable figure, that often he hardly seems to care where he is going next. So by the end, despite all the magic woven into the backdrop, neither do we.