He is rescued by Randolph who brings him back to the Landing and nurses him back to health.

Idabel disappears and Joel searches for her in a storm, taking refuge in an abandoned house before collapsing with pneumonia. Zoo leaves for Washington, and Joel and Idabel run away to a carnival in Noon City, where they meet a blonde midget named Miss Wisteria. Joel finally discovers his father in an upstairs bedroom, paraplegic and partially mute after being accidentally shot by Randolph in a drunken brawl years before. He also sees a “queer lady” with “fat dribbling curls” watching him from a upper window, whose presence is similarly unexplained. Joel strikes up a friendship with Zoo, who dreams of escaping to live in the snowy Northern states, and his neighbour Idabel Thompkins, a ferocious tomboy. Despite Joel’s frequent questions, no one will reveal his father’s whereabouts. Joel’s father is mysteriously absent, and the only other inhabitants are the young housekeeper Missouri Fever (nicknamed Zoo) and her elderly father Jesus. There he meets his dour stepmother Amy and her cousin Randolph, a flamboyantly gay drunkard who reminisces about a lost romance with a Latino boxer named Pepe.

After a difficult journey, he arrives in the remote township of Noon City, and from there travels to his father’s home, a decaying mansion on a former slave plantation named Skully’s Landing. Joel Knox, a lonely and effeminate 13 year-old boy, is sent to Mississippi to live with his father, who abandoned the family shortly after Joel’s birth. In which I review Other Voices, Other Rooms, Truman Capote’s 1948 Southern Gothic novel about a lonely young boy sent to live with his creepy relatives in Depression-era Mississippi.

Truman capote harold halma