Daniel Woodrell never comes close to making best-seller lists; in fact, unless you are part of his small cult following, you probably have never heard of him. But he is one of our finest writers, and it is high time his work found a mass audience.

His new novel, "Winter's Bone" (Little, Brown, $22.99), is his eighth, and it may be his best yet -- an instant classic.

Reviewers have labeled Woodrell's books, most of them set in his native Ozarks, "country noir," but they defy categorization. He has been compared to writers as stylistically diverse as William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler, Flannery O'Conner and Jim Thompson, Ernest Hemmingway and Elmore Leonard.

To that impressive list, let's add this: His tales are as disturbing as James Ellroy's, his dialogue as superb as the best of George V. Higgins, his style at once as stark as James M. Cain's yet as lyrical as James Lee Burke's.

However, his flawlessly spare, vivid prose resembles none of these masters. Daniel Woodrell is a stunningly original writer.

"Winter's Bone" tells the story of 16-year-old Ree Dolly, who selflessly shoulders the burden of caring for her mentally ill mother and her two young brothers when her father, the best crystal meth cooker in the county, goes on the lam.

On the first page, Woodrell introduces her this way:

"Ree, brunette and sixteen, with milk skin and abrupt green eyes, stood bare-armed in a fluttering yellow dress, face to the wind, her cheeks reddening as if smacked and smacked again. She stood tall in combat boots, scarce at the waist but plenty through the arms and shoulders, a body made for loping after needs. She smelled the frosty wet in the looming clouds, thought of her shadowed kitchen and lean cupboard, looked to the scant woodpile, shuddered."

Break that passage into poetic lines and you can see it for what it is. You can read the entire book as an epic poem -- a modern-day "Iliad."

Woodrell's dedicated following is accustomed to such brilliance. We've seen it before in "Tomato Red," "Give Us a Kiss" and "The Death of Sweet Mister." In fact, his last five novels were selected as New York Times notable books of the year.

Ree's quest begins when a deputy sheriff ventures up the snowy track to her wretched shack. Her missing father, he warns her, put up their property to post bond. If he doesn't show soon, Ree, her mom and the boys will be tossed out into the weather.

So Ree goes searching for him down the rutted tracks that pass for roads in these lawless Missouri hills. Her kin, the Dolly clan, warn her to stop looking. The Milton clan does the same, their warnings delivered with menace, and, eventually, worse.

In other hands, these hill people would be portrayed as ignorant hillbillies, or, perhaps, romantic outlaws. But Woodrell lives here, his family's roots stretching back to the 1840s. In his hands, they are cultural renegades, living outside the law of the land but enforcing a strict code of their own with Old Testament ruthlessness. The first rule: Mind your own business.

It is a rule Ree is too desperate to obey. She persists in her search with a stubborn dignity.

Woodrell tells her story with empathy but without a trace of sentimentality, transforming a simple country girl into one of the most memorable female heroes in modern American fiction.