To say that William Walsh is a deliberate writer who knows the value and timing of language is an understatement. His first novel Lakewood, published in 2022, is a coming-of-age story that explores family, secrets, lost love, and forgiveness. A project begun in the 1970s, it was set aside, and worked on over 39 years. As a teacher of creative writing at Reinhardt University, editor of the James Dickey Review, and author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Walsh insists on perseverance and tenacity in his own writing, and he stresses those values to his students.
And now, three years later, comes Haircuts for the Dead (Mercer University Press 2025), which Walsh calls an “unconventional story.” Begun in 1988 as a comedic jab at a disliked co-worker, his second novel took a number of twists and turns in character development and point of view over the course of 37 years, and it became a work focused on the themes of spirituality, the Fall of Man, and redemption. What began as farce—the original 300 pages were eventually scrapped except for one rape scene and one Bible verse—becomes a powerful story of the past, family secrets, and racism in a small town.
Hannah Gardner, the protagonist, is six years old when the novel begins, living on a farm in Sundown, Georgia, with her older brother and sister and Lucas, her twin. Her father Darnell takes money the mother had saved, buys an old travel trailer, and takes the family on a six-day fishing trip. The family dynamics, to put it mildly, are rife with disarray, hurt, and suspicion. When Hannah’s mother has a stillborn baby, it is buried on the farm and becomes the first of many secrets Hannah must bear. When her history teacher says that “not everything in this world is meant to be discovered,” Hannah’s life becomes one of keeping buried family secrets about violence and race and suppressing her own guilt over organized religion and her own developing spirituality.
Now 21, Hannah openly questions her small-town Baptist church beliefs about original sin, the word of God, and the virgin birth. She begins to keep a journal, which she calls her “Document of Life,” where she can write down her doubts and questions about small-town values and family strife. The novel’s title comes from the new job Hannah gets cutting hair at a funeral home, which allows her some independence and enough money of her own after the father sells the farm and the family becomes further fractured over misspent opportunities. Hannah also meets Margaret, a Black girl who works at the local library where Hannah can dream of a way out of her present life and write in her journal, just as she had done on a large flat rock on the family farm before it was sold. Their complex best-friend, burgeoning platonic love is at the heart of why Hannah both fears and needs truths she can understand.
William Walsh
Walsh, in these first few chapters, establishes and explores the dynamics of what happens when we try to uproot the buried past and suffer the consequences of not sharing our community’s inherent beliefs. Hannah becomes a lightning rod for her family’s sins and greed, and she gets caught up in having to lie about herself, her relationship with Margaret in the town’s racial environment, and her family’s whereabouts. This same attraction/repulsion to the truth is directed at Hawkshaw Bales, a rich Black man she first meets when he comes looking for her brother Lucas for payment of a large gambling debt. When Bales offers to forgive the debt if Hannah will sleep with him, she relents, and the novel tumbles further into darker, more sinister consequences.
Hannah becomes pregnant with Bales’s child, and he sues her to prove he is the baby’s father and wants custody. He threatens her and questions her family members about where she is; they lie to protect her. Bales, previously indicted on various crimes, is no one to contend with, so Hannah must stay ahead of him. Bales’s eventual murder will leave the reader guessing who is the killer, yet it is violence against her and him both that now leaves Hannah free. The novel’s last line is a Biblical quote from John 16:33 that she puts into her Document of Life: “You will have suffering in this word. Be courageous! I have conquered the world.” The grief and horror Hannah experiences in the world she grew up in have prepared her for the journey she takes to freedom and raising her child with someone she loves.
The novel ’s central focus, and one that forms the structure of Hannah’s rise from feelings of isolation and sinfulness to the moment of enlightenment, is that of religion. Some 20 years into the 38-year process of writing Haircuts and moving away from comedy, Walsh tells an interviewer that he got the idea about the fall of man and making his protagonist someone who cannot accept organized religion’s answers for her, and she must explore her own spirituality. It is important that Walsh expanded the lone Bible verse he kept from the original manuscript and frames the narrative with Bible verses that begin and end the novel. Throughout are Biblical passages that parallel Hannah’s awareness and growth to a reconciliation of who she is, much the same way that Dante moves man from the inferno through to paradise. Hannah’s family and her relationship with Bales lead to a kind of enlightenment she can only achieve by leaving Sundown and moving away to start a new life with Margaret, her protector and lover.
If, as Walsh said in an interview for The Blue Mountain Review in 2017, “everything is a metaphor for the greater mysteries in life,” then Haircuts for the Dead surely represents the possibility of changing your life for the better, no matter the circumstances you were born into. In a way, Hannah must lose her old life to be prepared for one newer and better. The only way she knows how to move on is by rejecting her childhood church and even her family. Walsh has written a story that demonstrates his persistence and his willingness to reshape what does not work. Haircuts is a highly-recommended novel, and I predict much continued success for this born writer and observer of life.
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