The Dead Eye Boy

Together the two of them are striving for a clean life, attempting to overcome rough youths, bouts with hard drugs and, for Billy, jail time and the marine corps. They try to believe in love as it's come to them through grace

Soren, the self-described "Dead Eye Boy", is Shirley-Diane's fourteen-year-old son and the damaged reminder of her dark past, his eye having been malformed in childbirth. Soren intuits his mother's ambivalence about his existence, manifest in their hardbit semi-sibling relationship, which is close, playful and deeply antagonistic. For Billy, Soren is not only a reflection of his own painful childhood but a chance for redemption

With a shaky, untrained, but resolutely sincere manner, he reaches out to the boy-as no one reached out to him in his youth. With the constant, terrifying spectre of their addiction always close at hand, the three of them face off and pair up in ever-changing power and love lines that ultimately converge

"...a grim, insightful portrait of an unmoored family...shows a fine, un-forced ear for Southern blue-collar dialogue. And it transforms what might have been an animated case history into a far fresher study of irrevocably warped impulses" ~ NY Times