What people are saying about Strangers to Temptation
"Strangers To Temptation is one of those rare debuts where you think to yourself, where the hell has this guy been hiding? Gould walks a tight rope, his arms dipping back and forth between comedy and tragedy to find balance, and like all of the South’s best storytellers, he does not stumble and he does not fall. This is a dazzling collection."
David Joy, author of The Weight Of This World
"A master storyteller with a sharp eye for the brambles and blossoms of human nature, Scott Gould has created a book of interwoven stories that make his 1970s Kingstree, South Carolina a stage for the whole American drama. It's all here: War, death, racism, love, sorrow, kindness and big-ass Buicks with icily effective air conditioning. Strangers to Temptation should elevate Gould into the vanguard of modern Southern writers."
Peter Ames Carlin, bestselling author of Sonic Boom
"Scott Gould is the perfect guide through a 1970s South Carolina low country boyhood. Big dreams and missed opportunities, the limitations of friendship across the racial divide, love and loss, are just some of the questions explored with heart and humor. Strangers to Temptation is an impressive debut."
Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar
"If you are a sane, intelligent reader needful of stories that involve the heartbreak and hilarity of childhood, then you will cherish Scott Gould’s perfect collection of linked stories, Strangers to Temptation. In the tradition of Lewis Nordan, Gould’s now-adult narrator looks back on negotiating his small southern landscape with both an unflinching and frightful eye, confronted by the the distorted, maimed, misunderstood, well-meaning, and good denizens of Kingstree. It’s all about Love and the absence of Love; Truth and the absence of Truth; Exhilaration and Confusion. These stories are laugh out loud funny and wistful simultaneously. Who can pull that off? Answer: Scott Gould. I admire and love this collection, and wish that I’d written every one of the baker’s dozen stories."
George Singleton, author of Calloustown
“Gould writes beautifully of a boyhood where Lowcountry nature, wild and snakey, reigns over all: Life and death, heat and humidity, black swampwater rivers, and the joy of being a country boy riding his bike at night. ‘…When I hit the pools of lights under the telephone poles, the moths pelted me like soft bullets as I glided through them.’ Rest easy, Mr. Conroy. The rich literary traditions of the South live on.”
Wilton Barnhardt, author of Look Away, Look Away
"Scott Gould understands that the difference between a magician and a writer is not really all that much. In Strangers to Temptation he mesmerizes the reader and shows him the world anew — a southern world, the world of a boy just coming in to his own"