At a late point in Daniel Woodrell's new novel The Death of Sweet Mister, Shug, an overweight, 13 year old boy, finds his father's blood-filled boot in the sink. He knows his father is dead, and he immediately begins to clean up signs of the fight. After the broken dishes are swept up, blood scrubbed from walls, and pieces of flesh scraped off a frying pan and thrown away, Shug knows enough to carry the boot back to the shed where he hides it in the "farthest dark place." It will become useful later. When his mother returns with her lover, each nervous and out of breath from burying the body, Shug is watching TV. He tells them he's already eaten but he could use a snack. It's the kind of understated but pregnant response one expects from noir but, in the hands of Woodrell, the echo is deeper than that. By novel's end, though circumstances are inexact, it is clear Woodrell means that the echo heard is from Oedipus.

Shug is the "Sweet Mister" of the novel's title, and it's through his voice — itself coming from that "farthest dark place" — that events leading up to his father's killing are recounted. Shug and his mother, Glenda, live in a caretaker's cottage in the middle of a cemetery among (as Shug puts it) the "gathered dead." The time appears to be the early sixties, with vague references to Vietnam, dialogue laced with "daddy-o's"and "dig," and a punch-button Dodge. As in earlier Woodrell novels (Give Us a Kiss, Tomato Red), the setting is the Ozarks, on the wrong side of the tracks. Living with them is Glenda's husband Red Akins, a brutal ex-con who has enlisted Shug in various dope-stealing escapades throughout the local community: "Man stuff" as Red tells Shug — in case Glenda were to ask just what it is they are doing at nights.

No one seems to think Shug is Red's son, particularly Red himself, as he both physically and mentally batters away at the boy. But Shug is resilient and knows enough "to fall down and act destroyed" when he sees the punches coming. The boy also can needle back and, after one foray, asks for his share — shocking Red and signaling the boy's growing criminal savvy. The scene also illustrates Woodrell's dark tongue-in-cheek comedic touch. All the characters in the novel are grotesque (recalling Flannery O'Conner's landscape) and, like O'Conner, Woodrell will use comedy to signal darker happenings. In another scene, for instance, Shug is out delivering newspapers with the salty (or just plain nasty) Grandmother Akins. She peppers the boy with charges of being a sissy and challenging him on his newspaper throws. Upon dropping the boy off at the cemetery, she disgustedly tells him to make sure his mother gives him a "cookie."