It's every reviewer's hope to find a book that lends itself to single-word definition. Conveniently, Matthew F. Jones's third novel sits squarely in the middle of its own genre, and I'm happy to slap a name on it: hicksploitation.

The hick in question is a lazy, hard-luck, rural poacher named John Moon. Deserted by his wife, he lives alone in a trailer on one corner of his family's repossessed farm - not a pretty situation, but it looks like heaven compared to what's still in store for this unfortunate loser.

The exploitation takes the form of a narrative so relentlessly fateful that I found myself actually groaning out loud. Within the first eight pages, Moon accidentally kills a teenage girl (with, uh, a single shot), and so begins a steep descent into Appalachian hell on Earth, featuring gobs of money he isn't free to spend and a good-looking corpse in his deep-freeze. Thanks in part to his own ignorance and bad judgment, Moon has become an inadvertent criminal; his wife is terrified of him, and the book's hard-core criminals (a gang of sadistic killers) are looking to cut him up like a piece of venison.

Such an avalanche of ill fate requires a certain suspension of disbelief on the reader's part, but Jones has offset the improbability by creating an oddly sincere and accessible protagonist. Moon is a dumb but pure-hearted man, whose simple Everyguy desires (to bed his wife, hold his baby, drink some beers, walk in the woods ...) are ceaselessly foiled by a world he can neither control nor comprehend. Every decision he makes is the wrong one, and in the context of a tragic thriller, that seems so right.

The book's tone is geared well to its subject matter, and Jones definitely wins the Spartan Cup for stripped-down writing. His descriptive passages are so bare and matter-of-fact they seem to have been pulled directly from the mind of, well, a simple hick. And Jones's dialogue, though it often comes from the mouths of stereotypes (fat yokel cop, drunken small-town lawyer, beat-up floozie), has a satisfying ring of awkward authenticity.