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Brown Bottle

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Wade “Brown Bottle” Taylor is an alcoholic trying to protect his nephew Nick from the hardness of their region, Eastern Kentucky, and the world in general. He must end Nick's involvement with drugs and drug dealers in the area, and, fueled by his love for his nephew, Brown knows he must be the one to intervene to save him. But in order to save Nick, Brown must first save himself, overcoming a lifetime spent convinced he was unworthy. Brown Bottle's journey is one of selflessness and love, redemption and sacrifice, if only for a time.

164 pages, Paperback

Published February 2, 2016

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About the author

Sheldon Lee Compton

28 books103 followers
Sheldon Lee Compton is a short story writer, novelist, prose poet, and editor from Pike County, Eastern Kentucky.

He is the author of the short story collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012), Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014), Absolute Invention (Secret History Books, 2019) and Sway (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2020).

Compton is also the author of the novels Brown Bottle (Bottom Dog Press, 2016) and Dysphoria (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2019).

His poetry chapbook Podunk Lore was part of the Lantern Lit series (Dog On a Chain Press, 2018) and his first full-length poetry collection, Runaways, was published in 2021 by Alien Buddha Press.

Compton's novel, Alice, was named one of the Best Books of 2023 as selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance.

In 2021 Cowboy Jamboree Press published The Collected Stories of Sheldon Lee Compton and followed that in 2022, on the anniversary of author Breece D'J Pancake's tragic death on April 8, 1979, Compton's memoir The Orchard Is Full of Sound, which the publisher describes as a book that "reflects on his [Compton's] own life, his struggles with poverty and divorce and violence and addiction and fatherhood and an early heart attack and trying to make it as a writer in rural Kentucky, all the while trying to trace the life and tragic ending of one of his literary heroes, Breece D'J Pancake."

In 2012, Compton was a finalist for both the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Still Fiction Award. His writing has been nominated for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, the Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Wigleaf's Top 50. He was cited twice for Best Small Fictions, in 2015 and 2016, before having his short story "Aversion" included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and his short story "The Good Life" included in Best Small Fictions 2022.

Since 2020, he has taught in the Master of Fine Arts program at Concordia University, St. Paul. He also edits the Poverty House Collective and writes the interview series Chaos Questions for Hobart.

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5 stars
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14 (30%)
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6 (13%)
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
Profile Image for Richard Derus.
3,534 reviews2,165 followers
October 19, 2019
New review! BROWN BOTTLE is up at my blog, Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud.

Sheldon Lee Compton writes with a scalpel, and then tells his stories of outsiders and misfits and rage-filled unnecessary people in their own arterial blood. You NEED to read it! Bottom Dog Press gets kudos for taste and fearlessness.

Seriously, y'all, how many writers do this:
Tuck had always been made smaller made than Stan. Narrow shoulders, tiny hands and short fingers. Even as a young man his brown eyes were always watering like he'd been crying and his face never took hair well. What he had instead were four or five patches of hair that looked like a cluster of bee stingers popping straight out from his cheeks.

...and don't sound like they're hifalutin' city shitheads gettin' a down on the poor kid? Compton is just describing someone he knows, has seen, talked to, maybe even spent a football game with. Yet he's got the clinical detachment and visual acuity to do that character right. Damn!
Profile Image for Still.
619 reviews109 followers
December 30, 2021
I was about 70 pages into this slim 160 page book about a loveable old drunk named "Brown Bottle" when it broke into a tale of war between Kentucky hill folks squabbling over Oxycontin and other pain meds plus cocaine and marijuana and who has the rights to sell what to whom.

Old "Brown Bottle" went off to war and came home to be mocked for drinking until he knocked himself out to keep from thinking too much. He hated drugs and what they did to people. Booze? That was just medication.

All "Brown Bottle" wants to do is to see his nephew Nick through a bit of drug troubles and go on drinking.

I usually give a book 50 pages before I decide whether or not it's worth my time. There was something about the writing in this. I gave it 70 pages and then the novel just exploded into violence and vengeance in the hills of Kentucky.

Could have given this book 5 stars but ...60 pages plus for character development and local color?
No way you pull that stuff on me.
Time is brief.
Profile Image for Karin.
1,714 reviews26 followers
March 24, 2017
3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

This is a gritty novel revolving chiefly around Wade "Brown Bottle" Taylor and his nephew Nick. Wade earned his nickname as a long time alcoholic, and now he's trying to save teenage Nick from going further and further downhill with drinking and other substance abuse. There is nothing glorified or pretty about the depiction of these issues, but rather a more honest, blunt approach.

It's a book that started rather slowly for me and was hard for me to get into at first, as neither of these people was easy for me to learn to like and/or root for in any way, but it's one of those books that gets better as it goes on. The last third of the book was where I had a hard time putting it down to finish the next day. I have to admit that if I hadn't won this book with the agreement to participate in an author discussion, I probably wouldn't have read very far, and that would have been a shame because Compton can write, and write well. And I do not always give a positive rating to books I win for reviews, because that's not honest.

This is a book by an Indie press, so there are some typos that in no way ruined the story and it's always great to support Indie publishing companies, recording labels, etc.
Profile Image for Sandy.
24 reviews49 followers
March 9, 2016
The beauty of indie publishing is that, when you least expect it, you might stumble upon a gifted writer working at the top of his craft. Such is the case with Sheldon Lee Compton and his wondrous new novel, Brown Bottle.

Publishers like to slap labels on a writer’s work in order to make it easier to sell. While Compton is, in fact, a writer who lives in, and writes about, Appalachia, in this case labels would only detract from the fact that Brown Bottle is, quite simply, a great story.

The protagonist, Wade “Brown Bottle” Taylor, is a man possessed, by alcohol, and by the need to protect his young nephew from addiction. Set in and around a small town in eastern Kentucky that is slowly dying, the story of Brown Bottle is a universal one: redemption, revenge, love, hate, all the complex emotions are here, the motivations that cause people to do what they do. Each of the characters in this book (with one terrifying exception) will break your heart and make you wonder, as in all great stories, what you might do under similar circumstances.

The brutality of consequence is a central theme, as is the inevitability of circumstance, the devastation that widespread addiction can cause in a place where hope is no longer a realistic option. The desperation and anger that comes from abject poverty threatens to overcome many of the characters, but others stubbornly refuse to yield, finding ways to survive that won’t kill them by degree. The importance of family, and of the desire to do what is right, is at the core of the story, and of Brown Bottle himself. While reading I was filled with a sense of foreboding but also with a sense of hope, knowing that things would likely end well for some and not for others, because that’s what tragedy is.

Compton’s Appalachia is a place of stunning beauty, but he understands that showing us only the beauty of a place makes a story incomplete, why it is necessary to also see the ugliness in order to truly understand it. This is a place that is being destroyed by poverty and the ravages of drugs, two things that so often are inextricably linked. Despite the hopelessness many of the characters face, they never stop trying to recapture a life that is forever gone.

Here, one of the central characters looks back on his life as a child: “It was a summer night, the kind that can become perfect from the stars in the sky to the blades of grass around your feet. The two of them barely made it through a few drinks of the shine, but that didn’t matter. The rooftop of the shack was another world for them. From the top, they could see the light on in the living room of the house, meaning their mother was still awake, reading the bible as she always did of the evenings. All other windows in the house were dark, meaning their father had retired for the night. It was a time they felt safe, even though they were getting drunk right there at their own home.” Hardly an idyllic childhood, but Compton somehow manages to make it seem as if it were.
He doesn’t, however, shy away from the realities of addiction. “The boy,” he writes, in a scene where Nick, Ward’s nephew, is in danger of overdosing, “lay across a mattress on the floor. Beside him was a dinner plate with pill powder still stuck to sections, covering part of one petal from the design of hearts and roses. It was one of their mother’s plates. Many suppers off that plate, and now this. The thought of it ran over Stan and he charged the bed and shook the boy by the shoulders, his head whipping back and then forward, powder flying from his nostrils as he came to and opened his eyes.”

Compton plants the reader firmly in a place he knows well, and he does so on every page. “The town,” he writes, “was never truly quiet. There was a buzz, something electric going all the time. Streetlights, a piece of machinery at the truck garage across from the gas station, a low hum that seemed to come off the pavement, like the sun had pressed hard into it during the day and the heat sizzled up to the surface to join all that low sound. Sometimes it was hardly more than an occasional rattle from a Pepsi machine at the corner of the American Electric Power building.” After reading this passage, the small town is no longer simply a place; it has become a character all its own.

Here, in a single sentence, the reader can see the connection between past and present: “The dark morning air smelled of vodka, sour mash and, faintly, old wood gone soft with years of rain soaking through the bark and into the ageless soil and rocks beneath the roots.”

And here: “Nick moved away from the patch made from the bonfire, through a small collection of young trees, to the cliff no more than fifty feet or so out from the clearing. A low fog covered everything below, leaving but three or four mountaintops visible. The valley cradling the areas of Flatwoods and Big Fork was an ocean now and the mountaintops strangely colored icebergs. As the top ridge breeze kicked up, the fog moved like the slow motion waves of the sea. Nick looked out to the farthest tip of mountain in the distance and imagined it was an island, imagined living there and never speaking, never getting to know a single soul.”

The imagery throughout is wonderful: Guns N’ Roses turned up loud; red cherry whiskey; a cigarette shaken loose from a hard pack; marijuana growing in the middle of a cornfield, hidden between the tall yellow stalks, an elderly farmer working in his garden nearby. The juxtaposition between the two generations is startling: the opportunities afforded the elders who grew up in a different time, no longer available to the young who are forced to adjust the only way they know how. “Mountain folks,” Sheldon writes, “are nothing if not industrious.”
Brown Bottle is a violent story, yet one in which humanity somehow manages to shine. Compton has crafted a work of great beauty and great tragedy. Not an easy feat, but what a pleasure to read.





Profile Image for David.
Author 12 books145 followers
December 29, 2016
This book is both brutal and beautiful, gritty and dreaming. The prose is tight and clean, the images vivid, and the emotion raw. It's a damn hard world, but Compton still finds beauty and humanity in the hardness. Wonderful.
Profile Image for Book Concierge.
3,016 reviews378 followers
May 29, 2016
2.5**

From the back cover - Wade “Brown Bottle” Taylor is an alcoholic uncle trying to protect his nephew Nick from the hardness of their region, Eastern Kentucky, and the world in general. To end Nick’s involvement with drugs and drug dealers, Brown must first save himself, overcoming a lifetime spent convinced he is unworthy. Brown Bottle’ journey is one of selflessness and love, redemption and sacrifice, if only for a time.

My reactions
I received this book from the publisher with a commitment to read, comment and participate in an on-line book chat with the author.

Compton writes a gritty, no-holds-barred tale of a man struggling to do what is right. Brown’s sister has abandoned her son, Nick, and Brown tries his best to raise the boy, but Nick is in the grips of drugs and drug dealers. Brown recognizes the signs of despair and hopelessness in his nephew – he should, he lives in despair himself.

Compton is best known for his short stories; this is his first full-length novel. His ability with the short-story format shows in his writing. There are several vignettes that would make great short stories all by themselves – Brown’s “relationship” with Blair for example, or how Mrs Bell gets addicted to painkillers. If there is a failing in this novel it’s that sometimes Compton fails to adequately weave the vignettes together. The novel is only 164 pages long, and could have used more connective tissue.
Profile Image for Brett Milam.
375 reviews22 followers
July 29, 2023
Eastern Kentucky, as part of Appalachia, consists of hilly regions, and in many ways, Sheldon Lee Compton’s 2016’s novel, Bottle Brown, put his characters at the top of one of those unkempt hills and sent them rolling down through addictions, dreams deferred, and violent endings. The prose and plotting of the book kept that sort of tumbling-down-a-hill frenetic pace, with both the characters moving a lot through time and space, and the plot itself moving back and forth between recollections of the past and meditations on the present (and future, as it exists). Fittingly, Donald Ray Pollock, author of the book I loved reading last year, The Heavenly Table, blurbs this one, because Compton’s book captures Pollock’s southern gothic, country noir vibe, with his own take on it.

In Compton’s story, “Brown Bottle” is the derogatory nickname given to Wade Taylor, a Vietnam Veteran known for being an alcoholic and coming from a family with nothing much to say for itself. His sister, Mary, moves to Ohio, leaving behind her drug-addicted son, Nick. Wade sees himself as Nick’s protector, and Nick as essentially his own son, and given that his life ain’t worth much of anything, he figures, then why not help Nick by killing Nick’s dope dealer, Tuck. Of course, Stan, Tuck’s older brother, views himself as Tuck’s protector, much to the chagrin of his wife, Hen (short for Henry; her dad was weird, Compton tells us). As it turns out, Hen is also part of the dope web. For that matter, so is Wade’s best friend, Doug.

What’s interesting, though, is that in Eastern Kentucky, throwing stones at the addicted and troubled is liable to unearth the fissures in your own house: those who call Wade “Brown” or “Brown Bottle” are nursing their own addictions, mostly to pills. And the aforementioned web of people involved in pushing pills is what brings down the violence. Because Nick and his girlfriend, Ashley, who also is the daughter of the county sheriff (and his wife, Ashley’s mother, is also addicted to pills), hire a notorious hitman, Fay, to kill Tuck. But the hitman being the sociopath he is, figures on just killing everyone, Tuck, Nick, Ashley, Ashley’s mom, Wade, Stan, Hen, and so on. Killing seems to be his form of addiction. As if drug addiction and a propensity to violence in service to, or to mitigate, addiction wasn’t enough of an issue for these Appalachian folks, there is a sociopath meandering around with grandiose notions.

Wade is a tragic character, as one might expect with the titular character of a country noir book. Sure, at first, he tries to get sober to be a better adult presence in Nick’s life and steer Nick off of the same addiction pitfalls, but it doesn’t last long. And with addiction-based characters shouldering troubled histories — Wade killed his adolescent girlfriend’s father who was abusing her — there is a sense of inevitability to it all. Again, like they set off tumbling down the hill and well, at that point, you just gotta keep tumbling until the tumbling stops. Yes, Wade makes a choice to go after Tuck, then Fay, and even at the end, to fire upon Ashley’s dad and two other deputies, but in Wade’s brain, that was the inevitable conclusion to his life. He wasn’t much of something, hadn’t ever been much of anything, but this was something he could do. For Nick. That was the logic of it all, which doesn’t quite seem logical from an outsider’s perspective, but to his perspective, it makes as much sense as Stan defending his brother, Hen feeling it was her right to take some of Tuck’s drug profits, and so forth on down the line through these characters.

Like any addict or wayward soul, these characters just want to feel something — anything — more than their lot in life seems to provide. That in so seeking to feel, and thus feeling, they can escape, even if momentarily, the seemingly predetermined Appalachian bubble they were born into. Compton captures that malaise in these characters, their sense of hopelessness coupled with inevitability, and the chaotic essence of how their “choices” cascade into bitter ends, a reality far harder to swallow than the vodka left at the back of a sink cupboard.

Their true addiction is seeking an end to their desperation, and their ain’t no quick, cheap fix for that. The hardest addiction to beat is seeking an abatement of one’s desperation. So it goes.

Like I said, if you dig a Pollock or a Daniel Woodrell, then Compton will be right in your mucky wheelhouse. He sure was within mine, and I look forward to seeking out more of his writing.
Profile Image for Brian Tucker.
Author 9 books69 followers
June 4, 2016
Writing at the top of his game, Compton crafts a new wonderful slice of Appalachian fiction that is uniquely its own. While drawing comparisons to Larry Brown and others, Brown Bottle is one you should read and enjoy and appreciate it on its own merit. It's a great story, and I'm so glad it's out there for you to read now!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews

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