"Jim Goad said it all, and well," says Daniel Woodrell, referring to the former Answer Me! boss' book The Redneck Manifesto. In it Goad states, and proceeds to back up all claims, that the white American underclass commonly referred to as crackers, cornhuskers, rednecks and trailer trash are his country's cultural whipping boys, the thicko inbreds it's OK to hate.

Woodrell, author of such stunning modern classics as Muscle For The Wing, The Ones You Do and Woe To Live On (the latter made into the film Ride With The Devil by Ang Lee) also writes about these people. His next book, the one that will go down as his masterpiece, The Death of Sweet Mister, takes you to the heart of what it is to live in America's most brutalised, merciless quarters. It is the story of Shug, a 13-year-old boy, who lives in a graveyard and spends each day watching his mother, Glenda, getting variously raped, beaten and humiliated by her husband Red, who may or may not be his father. The only attention Red expends on the kid is to force him to steal drugs off dying, housebound cancer patients, so that he can feed his own habit. But slowly and surely, Red begins to fashion Shug in his own image.

"Monsters beget monsters," as the author points out. "Shug learns what tones and acts carry weight in his world and none of them are kind, or of that much use in other worlds."

The extraordinary, sparse beauty of the language Woodrell employs to convey this tale of innocence lost is akin to the haunting hillbilly bluegrass score of the Coen Brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou? The timeless refrain of the Ozark Mountains is the soul that popular opinion told you white trash doesn't have. The soul that Woodrell inherited at birth:

"My grandmother Woodrell was an illiterate domestic servant, stiff with religious fervor and ignorance. My father never overcame his hatred of organised religion or the stain of being the son of an illiterate servant who did not have a husband at home. So he drank and shared his range of eternal hostilities with his sons. I have never held a job in my life, often fired within hours. I joined the Marines the week I turned 17 only to be kicked out weeks before I turned 19 for 'pronounced anti-social tendencies' and assume some of my crankiness is inherited from dear ol' dad. Still and all, not the worst inheritance."

The author still lives in a neighbourhood that would be familiar to Shug, Red and Glenda. "This is a small town in the Ozarks and my area is the least fashionable, most full of grit life, crank (methamphetamine) cookers, and the like. The kid who weeded our garden was wanted on a fugitive warrant, the lady below arrested for hooking, that sort of commonplace. And, you do run into these 'families' that have no father and the teenage son is now clearly in charge and the mother clutches his arm and looks on him in a manner not altogether motherly."

The Death of Sweet Mister is the most pared-down book Woodrell has ever written: "I wanted this book to be bones, pared to the bones, the bones speaking. Shug's voice is leeched of illusion and the challenge was in keeping the scenes on a level of honesty equal to the voice. At one point, not far from the end, I had to wrestle for a week with the possibility of, 'Hey, couldn't some happier Walt Disney finish pop up to save the boy?' But, no, the only true ending was already there."

Woodrell has presented the true world of the Ozarkers with such clarity and depth that you can feel his characters walking into a room, smell their breath, shudder through their crank shakes, hear the bluegrass/rockabilly soundtrack twanging in their heads. And when he went back in time for his Civil War novel Woe to Live On, apparently he only had to look at the photographs of his ancestors to hear the voices they spoke in.

"Language is the steeple, the point of it all. If I had the stamina, the willingness to be even more of a risk-taker, I would be a poet. Bluegrass and rockabilly seem tribal to me, tribal music from the far and less far past of my bloodlines. I see family photos in the dark when I hear such music. Some Celtic stuff makes me weepy and wounded, grieving for long ago losses I never suffered. Whoever invented bagpipes should have to rise from the dead and buy healing drinks for two billion morose drunks whose binges he inspired. As to ancestral photos, and conjuring, well, I have a bunch of strange little neo-mystical writerly rites that I should probably keep to myself."

For now, Woodrell believes he has reached a peak.

"In this book I attained a new control, and hard utter ruthlessness toward the material, and this hard utter ruthlessness very much agrees with me. I like lean books as it is the bloat in a novel, all that essayic fat, that rots and becomes misshapen over time."

Read it and weep for the lost lowly white trash you never knew you cared for.