Writers, as they hone their craft, learn that their stories must begin with a bang. The character’s apple-cart of a world must be turned upside down.

An exploding dance hall will do it. That how Daniel Woodrell starts his book, The Maid’s Version.

Well, actually he starts with a young boy hanging out with his grandmother, Alma. He hates her “pinched, hostile nature.” Mentally, she’s already gone around the bend. She’s convinced that men watch at the kitchen window every night when she changes from her house dress to her nightgown.

But when Alma tells the story of the dance hall that exploded back in her Ozark hometown in 1929, our grandson/narrator is all ears.

Back then, Alma cleaned house for the best banker in town, and his overly-delicate wife, an heiress who pulled him up from the ranks of the common people to her station in life.

Maids see things. Maids talk to each other.

As for the explosion, forty-two people died. The funeral was twenty-eight caskets lined up in the high school gym. Alma touched and kissed every one, since she wasn’t sure which one (or two or three) held her sister, Ruby.

“It was more than the death, boy,” says an old resident, “it was also the maiming, the ruining, breaking folk into parts that left them incomplete but still breathing. You’d see them pretty regular limping down the avenue, maybe using crutches, or trying to work with one arm at a two-armed job, buying face powder by the bucketful to hide the scarring, certain ladies always wearing knotted scarves so you might not notice there’s ears missing off their head.”

It was finding body parts when you plowed your fields months after the explosion, or when you cleaned your rain gutters.

Of course the reader wants to know how it happened. Was it an act of God, like the preacher warned? Or did somebody throw a match? And if so, who? Was it the city tough who moved here to get away from his gang? Was it a jealous lover? An embittered farmer? The “Rooshian”?

Woodrell’s story marches forward and backward in time, all of it in twisty sentences. Each one carries so many tacked-on clauses, the effect is like hanging all your earrings on your necklace. I don’t know if this odd grammar is the folksy way people talk down in the Ozarks, or if it’s just Woodrell’s inventiveness.

I suspect the latter.

In fact, I’d bet my next Butterfinger Blizzard that his bookshelves hold everything William Faulkner wrote, every book well underlined.

Though stocked with a few characters whose purpose I can’t discern, this would be a good novel to read a second time, just to catch what I missed on the first go-round.