For a populist form, country music is not to everyone’s taste. Its smooth and stylized emotions can seem a world away from the unvarnished pain of the blues. But once in a rare while, a true country heartbreaker will come along – a song sung in a voice so urgent and plaintive, that even my skeptical ilk is startled to attention. So it is with Eliza Clark’s third novel, Bite the Stars.

Gently narrated by Grace Larson, a single mother living in the southern U.S., the tale opens with two accidents – a premature birth and a killer tornado. For Grace, her son Cole’s arrival in the world is twinned with random destruction and death. As he grows up, Cole seems inexorably drawn to the human version of such chaos. Sullen and uncontrollable as a child, wildly rebellious as a teenager, he spirals rapidly into a life of petty crime and addiction, then permanent imprisonment. His decent and well-meaning mother struggles to understand Cole, and her part in his tragedy. Grace wonders: did the errors and insufficiencies in his upbringing lead Cole to death row? Or is his violence a random fact of nature?

Long-suffering mamas and bad-ass outlaws: at heart, Bite the Stars resembles a traditional country ballad. But Clark, the Toronto-based author of Miss You Like Crazy and What You Need, writes with fluidity and restraint, delivering Grace’s pained meditations without descending into the realm of gulping sobs and smeary mascara. (Watch and learn, Reba McEntire.) Clark has been both criticized and praised in the past for frothy, zany fictional incursions into the tabloid South. In this third novel, however, she creates Southerners far too complicated and sad to find themselves on a Jerry Springer stage, or in the pages of the Weekly World News. Unlike so much fiction today, Clark’s is storytelling with high and believable stakes. As her Grace concludes: “I hoped if I held up moments to the light, studied them like sparkling diamonds, sharp to cut glass, stars in a boy’s eyes, I’d know why something that ought to shine darkens to black.”