The fatalistic title of Steve Earle's debut novel will not be at all surprising to those who wrote him off years ago as a talented but tormented Texas songwriter, who suffered through heroin addiction, a prison term and six marriages before he was 40 years old.
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More recent admirers may be taken aback by this darker side, knowing him only in his new incarnation as a New York-based leftist folkie, painter, playwright and character actor on The Wire and Treme. Once a drug addict, and one of the most unpopular men in the music business, today Earle is not only clean and sober, but quite respectable, too.
A novel, of course, is a much larger project than drawing your own album covers and reading back lines written for you by the likes of David Simon. And the thought of a reformed country-rock star turning to fiction is enough to make many serious readers cringe. But even when he was an addict, Earle specialised in what many critics hailed as the "novelistic detail" of his songs. That praise was well-earned. With the exception of Bruce Springsteen, America may not have produced a better narrative songwriter than Earle in the past three decades.
He delivered songs that were not only intricately crafted character sketches, but also stories with a certain kind of momentum - you listened to find out how they were going to end. There was Billy Austin, the first-person tale of a death-row inmate; Ben McCullough, the angry diatribe from a Civil War soldier about his sadistic general; and Tom Ames' Prayer, the last meditations of a cornered outlaw. In the latter, this is how Earle sets the scene in the second verse:
Outside the law your luck will run out fast
And a few years came and went
Til he's trapped in an alley in Abilene with all but four shells spent
The man knows how to set a scene.
Yet, as Earle's novel begins and we meet Doc, a heroin-addled physician who performs illegal abortions in San Antonio's poorest neighbourhoods and who, it is revealed, is regularly visited by the ghost of Hank Williams, one fears that Earle is hewing too closely to the old axiom to "write what you know".
Predictably, Doc is a mess. He spends his days trundling off to meet his drug dealer and his nights in a tavern where anyone needing his services knows to find him.
Earle plays it small, eschewing any obvious drama in these early chapters, and it's tempting to suspect the larger canvas is too much for him. Even more discouraging, the scenes with the ghost of Williams are gimmicky and ineffective.
It is 1963 when a young man brings his 16-year-old girlfriend to Doc. Earle captures the deeply shameful atmosphere that surrounded abortion in the early Sixties, heightened in the heavily Hispanic (and thus Roman Catholic) community of southern San Antonio.
Of course, Doc does his job, the boyfriend leaves and the girl - her name is Graciela - stays behind to recuperate.
But then Doc, his dealer, the girl and the proprietors of the tavern decide to make a trek to the airport to see the dashing young president, John F Kennedy, and (more importantly to the women, at least) his gorgeous wife, Jackie, on their fateful two-day, five-city tour of Texas.
Graciela cuts her wrist on a fence as she pushes to the front of the crowds in an effort to catch a glimpse of the first lady as the president and his entourage swoop by. The incident appears inconsequential at first, but soon, strange things start to happen: Doc's patients recover quickly and abandon their immoral lifestyles when touched by Graciela's hands, and even Doc's need for narcotic escape begins to subside.
It becomes apparent that Graciela's wounds, which refuse to heal, might in fact be a form of stigmata. Meanwhile, a Catholic priest is sent to investigate the strange rumours that circulate about this Mexican girl in south San Antonio, even though Doc is a confirmed non-believer. His struggle to come to terms with what is happening around him occupies the last third of the book.
Earle has been an outspoken critic of religious fundamentalism in Texas, his home state. But here he displays great tenderness towards those who profess to have enjoyed the mysterious beauty of God's grace, a generosity that is almost certainly tied to the hours Earle has spent with fellow recovering addicts.
In the end, this first novel is big-hearted, troubling and touching - a welcome surprise for fans and perhaps a gateway to Earle's music for the literary crowd. In fact, music lovers will recognise that the book's title is ripped from a Hank Williams song, a tune that went to number one in the weeks after the legendary outlaw was found dead in the back seat of a Cadillac at the age of 29 in 1953.
Earle covers the song on the version of his latest album available on iTunes, which was released on the same day as the novel and bears the same name. It is a worthy companion to the book, albeit considerably less surprising.
There are few signs on it of the "hardcore troubadour" from his early years, as he collaborates with producer T-Bone Burnett on a relaxed collection of country-rock and folk. The strongest two tracks are the openers, Waiting on the Sky to Fall and the anti-Bush polemic, Little Emperor, in which he sings:
No more pomp and circumstance
No more shock and awe
You're just a little emperor, that's all
But here again, the Hank Williams song seems out of place, a mere reminder of the wit of the original rather than a clever update.
You can imagine a scenario where Earle's agent suggests it as a marketing ploy: "What if we make the ghost of Hank Williams visit Doc and then we can package it with a record?" But most of Earle's fans would hope that in that circumstance he would tell the agent to go to hell.
Brad Reagan is an assistant editor for the Business section of The National.