Deliverance

Four suburban Atlanta men, the narrator Ed Gentry, the survivalist Lewis Medlock, the insurance salesman Bobby Trippe, and the guitar playing executive Drew Ballinger, take a canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in north Georgia before a new dam floods it into a lake, a last look at wilderness Lewis has been pushing the group toward for months. After an unsettling encounter with a local boy playing banjo, two armed mountain men ambush them at gunpoint, tying Ed to a tree and raping Bobby before Lewis kills one attacker with a hunting arrow just as he turns his attention to Ed; the second man escapes into the woods. Rather than report the killing to the authorities and risk a trial none of them trusts a rural county to run fairly, the four bury the body and press on downriver. That night the group runs a dangerous stretch of rapids that goes badly wrong: Drew is shot, or falls, the men are never entirely certain which, and drowns, while Lewis shatters his leg badly enough that he can no longer function. Ed climbs the gorge alone after dark to hunt the surviving mountain man before he can find them first, and in a tense exchange of gunfire in the dark, kills a man he can never be fully certain was their actual attacker rather than an unrelated hunter. The survivors reach the town of Aintry with a fabricated accident story, weight Drew's body and sink it in the new reservoir rather than let an inquest connect it to the killings upstream, and get away with what they have done, though Ed carries the river back with him into his ordinary suburban life for good.

Dickey, already a celebrated poet before this first novel, writes prose dense with physical sensation, the feel of a bowstring, the sound of water on rock, and the book reads with real narrative drive even as it lingers over that sensory detail; some readers find the violence gratuitous where Dickey clearly intends it as the whole point, a controlled test of what supposedly civilized men will actually do under pressure.