Read the headline, immediately thought of my fave redneck character, Darell from The Walking Dead, and there you go...his creator was from KY. But Hillbilly Elegy struck me as exploitive (weirdly, since it's personal) from the get-go. Dickey used rural backwoodsy people and places as a metaphor to some extent...a metaphor for the terror "people" (urban) feel when tossed into a foreign environment. He said he was writing about a universal fear, or being set upon by strangers. And what is stranger to a suburbanite than hillbillies with rifles? I think there is a reason Ned Beatty's character, the squarest and most suburban of them all, was tortured.