The Terror by Dan Simmons. Little, Brown and Company. 2007. 769 pages.

Dear readers, let’s begin by establishing two contrary conclusions regarding this massive, painstakingly researched novel: First, the writing in The Terror is masterful; it reeks of atmosphere, intrigue and suspense. Second, I cannot, in all honesty, recommend this book to readers who are troubled by a narrative that is steeped in unrelenting suffering and despair. Having said that, let me reiterate: The Terror is an astonishing work.

The Terror is a fictionalized (and fantasized) account of Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition (1845-1848) to the Artic — purportedly, to find the illusive Northwest Passage. Initially, the expedition consists of two ships — The Terror (Sir John Franklin commanding), and The Erebus under Commander James Fitzjames. The two crews total 126 men. However, within a few weeks of reaching the Artic Circle, both ships are locked in a vast waste of ice. Artic nights are 22 hours long, and the temperature rarely rises above 50 below zero.

The hardship endured by the members of this expedition borders on the unbelievable: frostbite, gangrene, amputations (mostly feet and fingers), scurvy and before this tale is finished, cannibalism. Eventually, Franklin and Fitzjames discover that the ship’s canned foods have been poorly processed in London and the majority of it is spoiled and/or contaminated. As the daily allowance of liquor (grog) diminishes, the likelihood of mutiny increases. Coal is running out and the ice field surrounding the ships is expanding. A thaw seems unlikely, and as the “pressure” ice begins to literary squeeze the two ships to the point of shattering the outer hull, Franklin and Fitzjames reluctantly discuss the possibility that they might eventually abandon the vessels and attempt to drag sleighs loaded with diminishing provisions to a seaport or Esquimaux (19th century spelling of “Eskimo”) village. Success of such a venture is deemed unlikely.

However, all of these misfortunes combined do not represent a terror as great as “the thing on the ice.” There is something huge, white and deadly (much larger than a polar bear), which constantly circles the ships. Almost at its leisure, it snatches victims from the decks and even enters the ships, mangling and slaughtering its hapless victims. When the crew makes inept attempts to hunt or fish (all of the wildlife seems to have mysteriously disappeared), the “thing” murders the hunters, frequently beheading and disemboweling them.

In a series of terrifying encounters, “the thing” kills Sir John Franklin, slaughters three of the expedition’s four physicians and manages to snatch the majority of the trained seaman from the decks. Fitzjames dies of a combination of exhaustion, exposure and starvation. Eventually, the new captain of The Terror, Francis Crozier, attempts to marshal his forces and plan a retreat. Despite a demented, mutinous caulkers mate (who may be more dangerous than “the thing on the ice,” Crozier overcomes his own alcoholism and mental depression, unites the starving seaman of both ships and begins a painful (and pointless) journey.

Let me assure you that this synopsis barely scratches the surface of this novel. I haven’t mentioned Lady Silence, a beautiful Esquimaux girl who does not have a tongue. Considered a “Jonah” (jinx) by the seaman, she moves quietly among the starving men, managing to find food and shelter for herself in the frozen vastness beyond the ships.

During the latter half of The Terror, Francis Crozier emerges as one of the most engaging protagonists that I have encountered in recent fiction. After he becomes the official leader of the survivors, he frequently conducts religious services for the dead in which he reads passages from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. He also “hallucinates” and is blessed (or cursed) with “second sight.” (I’m not likely to forget the episode in which Crozier “channels” the infamous Fox sisters in upstate New York.) Suffice it to say that eventually, the reader will discover a mysterious link (or symbiosis) between Crozier, Lady Silence and the “thing on the ice.”

The Terror shows evidence of exhaustive research. This novel is packed with fascinating details about the Arctic and seaman, such as “growler” icebergs, ice that “screams,” Welsh wigs, the habits of Norway rats, seracs and a landscape that sometimes glows blue due to magnetism. There are deadly lightning and hailstorms, vibrating stars, a surreal “Carnivale,” (right out of Edgar Allen Poe) and tales of shaman who die laughing.

Most fascinating of all is a “Creation Myth” that bears a remarkable resemblance to the Cherokees myths about “the beginning.” However, author Simmons also presents a concluding episode that includes a grotesque parody of the Catholic Communion service that may leave readers stunned. If you read this one, please tell me what you think about the conclusion. Visit my blog: hollernotes.blogspot.com/.

To tell you the truth, when I read that some woman claiming to be Popcorn Sutton’s daughter was publishing a book about her legendary father, I was openly skeptical. Following Popcorn’s suicide on March 16, 2009, I surfed thorough a lot of sites on the internet where I encountered an astonishing number of references to alleged relatives (sons, wives, ex-wives and lovers) — all who were frantically working on their “personal recollections” of this colorful and fiercely independent man. The odor of shameless greed and b.s. hung in the air like the stench of a dead and/or offended skunk on the interstate.

Well, I was pleased and a bit humbled to discover that Sky Ann Sutton is the real thing. Born in Cocke County, Tenn., and currently living in Massachusetts (where she earns her livelihood as a New England historian), she grew up as the only daughter of a single mother. Sky readily acknowledges that most of her information about Appalachia has been gleaned from her mother’s Foxfire books. Even though her attempts to talk to her father (by phone) were disappointing, she was readily accepted by a host of Popcorn’s relatives, so she maintained contacts with all of them. As a result this book is filled with old photographs, marvelous yarns and testimonials of love.

Of course, none of the messages are from Sky Ann’s father. “Marvin Sutton and I have never been formally introduced,” she says. “I’ve been known to call myself Rumpelstiltskin’s daughter because if my father ever met me, he’d have to guess my name.” In evaluating her “paternal relationship,” she wryly concludes, “The only thing I was sure of was that my father had washed his hands of me.”

As a consequence, Daddy Moonshine resembles a scrapbook more than a biography. However, it is one hell of a scrapbook, filled with perceptive insights, hilarious anecdotes and poignant memories. There is a priceless collection of photographs and some of Popcorn’s raunchy stories would be at home in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Much of my empathy for Rumpelstiltzein’s daughter is due to being an abandoned child myself (a father dead and a mother who left me on my grandparents’ front porch), so I sometimes sensed other emotions lurking beneath the surface of Sky’s narrative, including anger and frustration mixed with a powerful need for acceptance from her “lost family.” (It is also an acceptance that, regardless of how often or how freely it is given, it will need to be repeated again and again.)

Potential readers should be aware of a singular fact. Daddy Moonshine was written before Popcorn’s death. Indeed, Sky’s manuscript was at the printers when she received a “text message” on her cell phone. Sky immediately contacted the printers and informed them that she needed to add a few pages. That final section became a moving eulogy to the father she had never met. Quoting a woman named “Becky,” Sky concludes Daddy Moonshine with this quote:

“There’s no way of telling how many times Popcorn Sutton went to town and, quietly and anonymously, paid the light bill, the doctor bill or the drugstore bill for someone in dire need. He paid for several funerals, too, and left more than a few boxes of groceries on front porches in the middle of the night. Helping somebody wasn’t something he did for praise or thanks, it was something he did because that is what a man’s supposed to do. Do you suppose there is anyone who will do the same now that Popcorn’s gone?”

(Gary Carden of Sylva is a playwright, an author and has been awarded the North Carolina Folklore Award. He can be reached This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

Daddy Moonshine by Sky Sutton. Northhampton, 2009. 156 pages

As a struggling albeit brilliant writer, Gary Carden never turns down money.

So when an out-of-town man in a rental car appeared on Carden’s front porch offering a $1,000 down payment on the spot to write a play about Horace Kephart, Carden wasn’t about to say no. Carden was curious, however, what led the man to Sylva.

“He said ‘I’m told you are a remarkable playwright.’ Right away I was suspicious,” Carden recounted. When the man went so far as to call Carden “well-thought of,” it sealed that suspicion.

“I knew he was doing a snow job. I am not well thought of. I am eccentric and peculiar, so I said ‘Why don’t you tell me the truth?’” Carden said.

The man on his porch, Daniel Gore, was part of a growing cult of Kephart followers who have elevated the famed writer to folk hero status for his chronicles of early mountain culture. Gore, a musician, had written a collection of songs, called “Ways That Are Dark,” to accompany Kephart’s popular book, Our Southern Highlanders. Gore thought his CD would be the perfect soundtrack for a play, and he wanted Carden to write it.

Carden — who said he “owed everybody in the county” — took the man’s money and promptly went to town and paid bills and bought groceries. That night, he got to work on the play. An obsessive and incessant writer, Carden quickly churned out an opening scene. He cast aside the idea of fitting the play to the CD, but instead began writing a play about Kephart’s life.

Carden was no stranger to Kephart. As an authentic keeper of mountain culture, Carden has studied Kephart extensively. He finds fault in some of Kephart’s portrayals of mountain people. Carden sees Kephart as an “outlander” — someone who isn’t from the mountains but lays claims as an expert anyway — and proceeded to make that the name of his play.

Carden emailed the opening scene of Outlander to Gore, who soon reappeared on Carden’s porch. The scene simply wouldn’t do, Gore said.

Rather than a hero, Carden’s play portrayed Kephart as a drunken, broken man seeking a refuge from society in the Smoky Mountains, a “back of beyond,” as Kephart himself called in. By all accounts, Carden’s scene is exactly how Kephart arrived in the region. Kephart was famous among locals not for his writing that earned him so many accolades on the national stage, but for being a drunk. Gore wanted no part of that in his play, however.

“I told him ‘You can’t write about Horace Kephart without mentioning he drinks.’ It is the flaw that makes the man admirable. If he was perfect he would be boring as hell,” Carden said. “He was flawed, and it’s what makes people identify with him.”

Gore stood his ground.

“He said, ‘Try again,’ and left another check for $1,000,” Carden said.

After another trip to town for groceries — and a spending spree at the book store — Carden came home and got to work on the next scene. He emailed it to Gore, who once again balked.

“He said Kephart in the play has too many flaws,” Carden said. “I said ‘I am the playwright, you are the musician. I say this is a good play.’”

Carden told Gore if he was looking for was a “candy box” to wrap around the 12 songs of his CD, then Carden wasn’t his man. But Carden didn’t give up on the idea of a play on Kephart.

“I thought. ‘Hell I am going to write that play he didn’t want,’” Carden said.

As Carden toiled over the play, a strange thing happened. He started to like Kephart more and more. Carden once held Kephart in mild disdain. When Kephart fled his former life in St. Louis to hide out in the Smokies, he left a wife and six children behind. Throw in alcoholism and exploiting mountain people for book material, and Carden had plenty to hold against Kephart.

But Carden’s thoughts on Kephart softened as he climbed inside Kephart’s head to write the play.

“I will, just like any true native who lives here, grudgingly give Kephart his due,” Carden said.

Kephart’s tireless fight for the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is ultimately what won Carden’s respect. The park’s creation was a long uphill battle, and Kephart’s role as an advocate was integral to its success. Kephart loved the mountains and was willing to fight for them, and Carden saw that.

“He was a catalyst that made things happen. That stubborn persistence that he would get up and go on, get up and go on,” Carden said.

Many people around Bryson City were against a national park that would claim their homes and land. They didn’t take kindly to Kephart’s advocacy for such a thing.

“Common sense tells you it must have hurt him deeply when people turned against him,” Carden said.

Half way through the play, Carden quit writing, however. It wasn’t unusual.

“I have a house full of plays I never finished,” Carden said.

In this case, Carden realized people might not want to face a humanized Kephart, a Kephart who wasn’t a folk hero but a just a man with his share of flaws.

“I realized, ‘Hell people would not let me do this play.’ So I shelved it,” Carden said.

But a couple years ago, Carden decided to resuscitate it.

“The hardest part was the last two pages. They took me six months,” Carden said. As Carden recited the ending from memory — a moving soliloquy beside Kephart’s grave on the hillside above Bryson City — Carden’s eyes misted up a bit.

Carden is still hunting for a home for his Kephart play. He has approached the Smoky Mountain Community Theater in Bryson City and Western Carolina University theater department, as well as several others, but so far has not found any firm takers.

George Ellison never knows when a Horace Kephart pilgrim will come calling. But invariably, they will come — creaking up the wooden stairs that have smooth depressions worn into the treads from years of use — to Ellison’s second floor office where his writing desk overlooks Main Street in Bryson City.

Crude bookshelves tower around him, boards of various sizes straddling cinder blocks, packed cheek to jowl with an extensive library of nearly every book in print and out on the Southern Appalachians. The finish, if there ever was one, has long since worn off the wooden floor boards, and his writing chair is nearly threadbare.

Just around the corner 100 years ago, Kephart would have been found in a similar upstairs office, hunkered over a writing desk, penning passages on the wilderness and backwoods people who carved a hardscrabble living out of the mountains, and in his later years, tirelessly cranking out advocacy pieces calling for the creation of a national park in the Smokies.

Ellison himself first came to Bryson City more than 30 years ago on a quest of his own to learn about Kephart. Ellison was commissioned to write the introduction for a republishing of Kephart’s famed Our Southern Highlanders.

Little was known about Kephart then. What moved him to come to the Smokies and embark on a life in the wilderness among the mountaineers was a mystery. And much of his life still remains an enigma despite the best research by Ellison and other Kephart scholars.

After arriving in the mountains from St. Louis in 1904, Kephart took up residence in an old blacksmith cabin at an abandoned copper mine in Bone Valley, a sparse settlement high above Hazel Creek in what is now part of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Kephart not only immersed himself in the rugged mountain landscape, but in the unique breed of people he coined “mountaineers.”

“I became more absorbed in the study of my human associates in the backwoods. They were like figures from the old frontier histories that I had been so fond of, only they were living flesh and blood instead of mere characters in a book ... They interested me more than the ultra-civilized folk of cities,” Kephart wrote.

These were a “people apart” living in the “back of beyond,” according to Kephart, and he strove to become one of them.

“He knew how to immerse himself. When he went into a room, he didn’t try to assert himself. He asked for recipes or told a joke,” Ellison said. “He had time. He lived with them. If they didn’t say what he needed that time, well maybe they would next week.”

Over-reaching or spot on?

Kephart’s critics claim he painted the region with a broad brush in his acclaimed Our Southern Highlanders. While the characters in Kephart’s tales may have existed true to form, what about the mountain equivalency of landed gentry, living in painted clapboard houses with front porch columns, who wore starched white collars on Sunday and set their tables with china, and who sent their children off to college?

Instead Kephart’s characters were those living in steep hollows in poorly chinked cabins, wearing tattered overalls and threadbare socks, and relying on moonshine as their sole source of cash.

“He decided to take the qualities that many people would find offensive — pride, independence, suspicion of outsiders, clannish behavior, a propensity for violence, feuds — and romanticized them and made those qualities admirable,” said Gary Carden, a writer and Kephart scholar who lives in Sylva. “He compares them to clans of outlaws in the highlands of Scotland and Ireland. He was looking for the brigands and outlaws.”

While portrayed as poor and uneducated, Kephart’s backwoods characters typically triumph over their more educated counterparts. They show wit and cunning, strength and ingenuity in the face of adversity, and a wry sense of humor. They overcame a harsh environment to survive where others couldn’t.

Duane Oliver, a descendent of the very first settlers on Hazel Creek where Kephart took up residence, doesn’t fault the portrayals.

“He was a superb writer and historian,” said Oliver, 77. “He really loved these people and felt for them living on the backside of nowhere.”

Oliver hardly fits the stereotype promulgated by Kephart. His father was alternately an accountant, storekeeper and postmaster around Kephart’s old stomping grounds. Despite his early years in a one-room school house, Oliver studied in Europe and mastered in Greek and Roman art.

Oliver said Kephart’s writing wasn’t intended as a documentary on mountain culture.

“When you go to a place you find the colorful people to write about. The problem is when you read his book you think those are the only people who lived there, that everyone was ignorant and made moonshine,” Oliver said. “What my mother always said about him was he just wrote about the drunks.”

The people he chose to describe, however, he did so accurately.

“They were true to form,” Oliver said.

The problem, however, is that the outside world believed Kephart’s broad brush applied to all mountain people.

“The characters that emerge from Our Southern Highlanders are not representative of mountain life and folkways as a whole,” said Jim Casada, a popular outdoor writer who hails from Bryson City and is yet another Kephart scholar. “I think he fell into the trap of writing to sell.”

It’s no secret Kephart spiced up his writing. Ten years after Our Southern Highlanders was first published in 1913, Kephart added several chapters at the behest of a publisher: one on feuds, one on a bear hunt and three on moonshining. After all, it was the era of Prohibition, and the nation was fixated on alcohol.

“They said ‘Now you’ve got it Horace. We can sell this,’” Carden said.

A master observer

There’s one point on which Kephart critics and admirers agree: Kephart deserves accolades for his study of mountain dialect.

“He had a great appreciation for mountain talk,” Ellison said. “He had a wonderful ear.”

Kephart filled reams of pages in his journals with examples of the unique local vernacular. When it came time to write Our Southern Highlanders, Kephart produced rich and lively dialogue thanks to his years of careful notes. He clearly admired mountain talk and countered the notion that it was somehow less sophisticated. He in fact argued that it was more sophisticated. For example, Kephart recorded nine different phrases used by the same man when Kephart greeted him. His casual reply when Kephart asked what he was up to was alternately conveyed as “santerin’ about, brougin’ about, spuddin’ around, shacklin’ around, loaferin’ about, cooterin’ around, prodjectin’ around and traffickin’ about.”

“And yet one hears that our mountaineers have a limited vocabulary,” Kephart wrote.

Even Carden admits Kephart’s skills as an anthropologist were excellent.

“His assessment of people was rational and scientific. He treated them as a species to be studied,” Carden said.

Kephart’s depiction of mountaineers offered invaluable insight for government surveyors and appraisers orchestrating the massive upheaval of people to make way for the park.

“They were very well-versed in Kephart. They all had a copy of the book,” Carden said.

Even in the 1940s, when the creation of Fontana Lake would again force the exile of people from their homes, farms, churches and schools, Tennessee Valley Authority employees gleaned insight from Kephart’s pages before they embarked.

“They were cautioned they had to work with the local people, Appalachian people, and that they were a different people,” Carden said. “They were all given a copy of Kephart so they would understand who they were dealing with.”

Local color goldmine

When Our Southern Highlanders published, locals could have been offended by Kephart’s characterizations and cast him aside. But they didn’t know to do so, Carden said.

“The number of local people who read the book was so paltry,” Carden said. “Kephart had a distinct advantage. He knew they wouldn’t read it. They weren’t going to write a retort. They couldn’t contradict the portrait because they didn’t know it existed. He had a free hand. He could take liberties, and he admitted that.”

His audience was the literate elite of the time, “wealthy people like the Rockefellers who shared his concern that the wilderness was vanishing,” Carden said.

There was an en vogue school of writing in the early 20th century known as “local-color” writing. Authors played to regional eccentricities, peppering their books with real people and anecdotes that played up differences in attitude and speech. If his intention was to capitalize on that literary era, Kephart had stumbled into a goldmine.

Fitting in at first couldn’t have been easy, however. Ellison believes Kephart ultimately proved himself useful to his remote neighbors.

In a place with no doctors, Kephart knew enough first aid to set a broken arm or treat a goiter. He could write letters and address envelopes for those who couldn’t read. If Kephart was on a walk and encountered someone fixing a tub mill, he would stop to help, Ellison said.

Kephart was an excellent cook, indoors and out. He earned a place on many a bear hunt and fishing trip by the graces of his outstanding culinary skills over a campfire. Kephart’s book on backcountry cooking, Camp Cookery, was one of his most popular.

A profound expertise of firearms also got him a long way.

“He was a noted authority on guns and even had at least one patent on a bullet design,” Casada said, calling him “a true pioneer in ballistics.”

And he was, of course, an expert on outdoor living. Kephart’s book Camping and Woodcraft has been in continuous print for nearly a century, remaining the most popular outdoor how-to book ever written. Casada, who has a Ph.D. in history, wrote a lengthy introduction that appears in today’s editions of Camping and Woodcraft.

Casada believes Kephart learned by trial and error, partly from his youth in the rural West and his weekend escapes outside St. Louis as an adult. Casada thinks Kephart was an introvert, and therefore took to the woods as escape.

“He loved being in a backcountry camp around the old-time hunters and fishermen, but he also savored solitude. A lot of his time was spent in one-man camps in the ‘back of beyond’ as he put it,” Casada said.

‘A losing battle’

Critics of Kephart usually derail him for being an outsider — or outlander, as Kephart himself would say.

“There is a great distinction between being in the mountains versus of the mountains,” said Casada.

Casada has been chastised and threatened by Kephart’s descendents, demanding he cease his negative portrayal of Kephart. But he won’t.

“I am not an iconoclast, but I am not willing to ignore the past,” said Casada. “It is not that I am a great foe of his. I greatly admire him and empathize with him. I also find decidedly repugnant parts of his character.”

Chiefly, Casada finds fault in Kephart’s alcoholism and the fact he left a wife and six children behind in St. Louis when he moved to the Smokies in 1904. While Casada extolled Kephart’s outdoor skills in his introduction to Camping and Woodcraft, and later nominated Kephart to the American Camping Hall of Fame, Casada said he cannot forgive Kephart for abandoning his wife and children.

While Kephart’s flaws are more widely known today than even a decade ago, Casada believes Kephart’s elevation as a folk hero will win out.

“We are fighting a losing battle to reflect what the man truly was, someone of wonderful abilities but also with great shortcomings,” Casada said.

Casada and Carden can’t seem to shake Kephart from the pedestal he’s been placed on. This year Bryson City is throwing its first annual Horace Kephart Day. Casada offered several times to be a speaker for the event but was ignored. Carden was unable to garner a spot on the program either.

“A tremendous number of mountain people speak reverently of Kephart, almost as though he was a prophet,” Carden said.

Meanwhile, the North Carolina General Assembly embedded glowing praise for Kephart in a resolution honoring the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

But others still harbor a deep resentment, not only for doing mountain people an injustice in his portrayals but for his hand in creating the park.

“Every time I had my hair cut in Bryson City I would say ‘Tell me about Kephart,’ and the barber would cuss the whole time he was cutting my hair,” Carden said. “I discovered that a lot of local people had a grudge against Kephart. They held him responsible for the fact that their grandparents had lost their land, that they had to move out for the park.”

Indeed, that’s what Commodore Casada, now 99, thought to himself whenever he saw Kephart walking down the street.

“There goes that feller that’s for the park,” Commodore remembers thinking. He was a public character in town, so nearly everyone recognized him, although he walked around with his head down, seemingly sullen most of the time,” said Commodore, the father of Jim Casada.

The grips of alcohol

Kephart’s tendency to over-imbibe was well-known in Bryson City, according to Jim Casada, who gleaned first-hand accounts over the years from those who knew Kephart, particularly the owners of the boarding house where he lived in town for years.

“Every time he got a letter from his wife you could count on him going on a weeklong drunk. He wasn’t troublesome. He would go in his room, stay in his room and get drunk,” Casada said.

Everyone assumed his wife’s letters were importuning him for money, given the passel of kids she was raising on her own, Casada said.

Whether or not Kephart sent money, we’ll never know, Casada said. It’s likely Kephart didn’t have much to spare, despite being a regular contributor to numerous outdoor magazines. Kelly Bennett, the owner of a downtown drugstore and park proponent, bought Kephart a suit for a trip to Washington, D.C., to speak on behalf of creating the park.

Kephart once wrote he had little use for money “beyond what is needed for books and guns and fishing tackle.” Disdain for a lifestyle that revolved around money was a recurring theme for Kephart. “People seem to get no satisfaction out of anything but chasing after dollars without let-up from year to year,” Kephart wrote in his ever-popular book Camping and Woodcraft.

Why Kephart left his life in St. Louis and sought out the Smokies will always be a mystery.

“You can’t put someone on the couch 100 years later and psychoanalyze him, but something happened in St. Louis, perhaps a concatenation of traumatic events, and he never got over it,” Casada said.

Kephart had garnered national fame as head librarian of the St. Louis Mercantile Library for more than a decade, but his growing penchant for extended camping trips, and possibly his drinking habits, led him to lose the job.

Around the same time, he had a falling out with his wife. There are minor hints of infidelity on his wife’s part, but they are far from conclusive.

At the same time, it seems city life had become oppressive.

“He said he was running from what he called ‘the maddening cities of babble,’” Carden said.

The mid-life crisis even included a “half-hearted attempt” at suicide, according to Ellison, who attempted to piece the story together. Ellison would find a line from a letter here, a newspaper account there. There were just enough morsels to postulate a theory, but not enough to know definitively — the perfect combination for yet another rollicking debate among Kephart scholars.

Kephart wrote a short autobiography in the 1920s, but it offered little insight into the traumatic personal events that precipitated his flight to the Smokies. Kephart wrote simply: “my health broke down,” and on another occasion called it “nervous exhaustion.”

Kephart wrote he was “looking for a big primitive forest where I could build up strength anew and indulge my lifelong fondness for hunting, fishing and exploring new ground.”

Ellison believes Kephart thought back to a pure time in his life, his childhood in rural Iowa.

“He got it in his head that if he could find a place where life was being lived as it had when he was growing up, he could go there and put his life together,” Ellison said. “He probably did find one of the few places in the early 20th century that met the requirement that he was looking for. I think it was probably dumb blind luck that he found the place he needed.”

True intentions

Whether Kephart set out to exploit the backwoods people of the Smokies for characters in a book will never be clear. Was his motive merely to start a new life, or find a place to launch his writing career?

Ellison believes Kephart always wanted to be a writer. In fact, he had been writing for magazines for a decade prior to his move to the Smokies. Kephart offers his own account of his motives in the following passage in Our Southern Highlanders:

“When I went south into the mountains I was seeking a Back of Beyond. This for more reasons than one. With an inborn taste for the wild and romantic, I yearned for a strange land and a people that had the charm of originality. Again, I had a passion for early American history; and, in Far Appalachia, it seemed that I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors of a century or two ago. Besides, I wanted to enjoy a free life in the open air, the thrill of exploring new ground, the joys of the chase, and the man’s game of matching my woodcraft against the force of nature.”

But Carden wonders whether Kephart concocted the image of himself as an explorer as a clever bit of revisionist history. It made a better story for the public, not to mention a book publisher.

“I began to feel early on that he hadn’t come to be like Thoreau and back nature into a corner and reduce it to its lowest means,” Carden said. “Kephart said he had picked this place on a map as being one of the most remote sections of the United States and had come here to live. But I got the distinct feeling he came here to die.”

Carden points to the first-hand account of Granville Calhoun, the “squire of Hazel Creek,” who initially put Kephart up in an extra room in his house.

When Kephart disembarked from the train at Hazel Creek, Calhoun claims he not only couldn’t walk but kept falling off the mule. Calhoun and his wife nursed Kephart back to health. Kephart’s symptoms as described by Calhoun sound vaguely like severe withdrawal for a serious alcoholic, and the subsequent recovery like a period of detox.

Accounts claim that Kephart stayed sober for his three years on Hazel Creek, and didn’t return to the booze until taking up residence in town.

Perhaps Kephart knew, and perhaps he got lucky, that the Smokies would have a nearly instant and profound affect on him, both physically and spiritually.

“What ever happened to him saved his life,” Carden said. “He stopped drinking and got healthy, started hiking and was excited and enthusiastic about everything he saw. This place virtually saved his life.”

Surreal South: an Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry edited by Laura Benedict & Pinckney Benedict. Winston-Salem: Press 53 $19.95 – 378 pages

The co-editors of this anthology, Laura and Pinckney Benedict, know “surreal” when they see it. In fact, Pinckney, who wrote a memorable short story collection called Town Smokes in 1987 at the age of 23, easily qualifies as a connoisseur of Southern bizarre/grotesque literature. Often compared to Flannery O’Conner, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote, Benedict’s work (“The Sutton Pie Safe,” for example) often appears in college textbooks and anthologies. Laura Benedict writes “Southern Gothic thrillers (Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts and Isabella Moon).

Surreal South explores a country where hot summer nights are filled with sheet lightning and mournful owls that sometimes serve as harbingers of death. This is a South filled with small towns where football players and cheerleaders acquire the status of royalty. The deceptive landscape of abandoned farms, old country stores and summer languor often conceals potential evil; an evil that may have the comic face of a clown. Let ’s sample a few stories and poems.

The source of Ron Rash’s “Corpse Bird” is that dim world of folklore that lies beneath the surface of a Southern suburbia — a place where rural farmlands and forests have been buried beneath a veneer of civilization. When Boyd Candler hears the call of the owl his ancestors called the “corpse bird,” he knows that death has come to his modern suburban street. Since his neighbors no longer believe such “superstitious nonsense,” Boyd must make a decision — one that may cost him dearly.

Robert Olen Butler’s “Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover” presents the dilemma of Edna Bradshaw, a lonely divorcee in Bovary, Ala. Edna finds love in the nearly deserted Wal-Mart parking lot (it closes at 9 p.m.) where she encounters Desi, an alien that has “loved her from afar” but now yearns for a “close encounter.” Should Edna abandon her little trailer (with her own propane tank) and her yellow cat, Eddie, for life in another galaxy? Is Desi’s sexual agility a sufficient basis for a lasting relationship? Most importantly, is Desi real?

“Dog Song” by Ann Pancake represents the most diverse and imaginative story in this collection. Like Faulkner’s narrative in The Sound and the Fury, “Dog Song” presents a “stream of consciousness” narrative: Matley, a brain-damaged outcast whom20the locals call Dog Man – (because he has become the guardian and breadwinner for 22 stray/abandoned dogs). Pancake’s remarkable narrative attempts to recreate Matley’s thoughts. The result is a strange blend of vivid imagery, hallucinaations and disjointed, rhythmic passages that capture Matley’s soul and a mind which has a strange, heartbreaking beauty.

For anyone who has grown up in a small southern town with a rigid social caste (townies/country kids), Benjamin Percy’s “Swans” may bring back a host of discomfiting, cruel and comical memories. Drew, the protagonist of “Swans” lives in the little town of Overall that is next to the big town of Murfreesboro. Drew and his friend, Kenny, are accustomed to being humiliated and demeaned by Murfreesboro football team. Further, they live in a constant state of adolescent shame and inadequacy when they behold Murfreesboro’s cheerleaders who sunbathe all summer on a secluded beach. However, the two inept boys are talented voyeurs. Equipped with snorkels, they learn to lurk beneath the water when the cheerleaders leap from a nearby cliff. As the bikini-clad girls drop beneath the water, they frequently lose their tops. Drew and Kenny ogle and whimper. Ah, but there is a disruptive force at the lake — one that threatens to destroy Drew and Kenny’s Eden. A great flock of vicious swans patrols the lake, hissing and flogging the frightened cheerleaders. This reviewer is giving too much away. Suffice it to say, “the plot thickens.”

This is a big book and this review has barely scratched the surface. Readers will also encounter a classic horror story, “The Paperhanger,” by William Gay. Kathy Conner’s “The Widow Sunday” presents a marvelous story about a widow who has a horn growing out of her head and a young woman who covets it. Joy Beshears Hagy provides a classic example of “shock fiction” with a short story, “Dinner Date,” that is one paragraph long (Ted Bundy dates a vampire.) There is a poem about a clown who calls himself Cactus Vic and drives a Wonder Bread truck. Even Joyce Carol Oates gets in on the action ... and dear reader, there are a dozen more stories that cannot be discussed here, since I’ve run out of space. Read this one if you love the kinky South.

(Gary Carden is a writer and storyteller who lives in Sylva.)

Mother Jones by Elliott J. Gorn. Hill and Wang, 2002. 408 pages.

When Mother Jones celebrated her (allegedly) 100th birthday on May 1, 1930, our nation rejoiced with her. Hundreds of telegrams arrived from statesmen, celebrities and politicians, including Eugene Debs, Clarence Darrow, Carl Sandburg and her old enemy, John D. Rockefeller. Many of her well-wishers, only a few years before, had endorsed efforts to silence or imprison her; but now, noting that the woman, who had been called “the walking wrath of God,” was in failing health, her enemies relented and became conciliatory. “Mother” greeted Union officials who arrived with a gigantic cake with one hundred candles. Even the New York Times (one of her most persistent critics), now cooed about her long life of valor and dedication. Yes, it appeared that the fierce old lady, who had once defied machine guns (armed only with a hat pin), had finally been “declawed, defanged and domesticated” — by time.

Author, Elliott Gorn presents the life of Mother Jones as two stories since in his view there are two people in this biography: Mary Jones and Mother Jones. Mary is a young woman who fled poverty and oppression in Ireland only to fall victim of a cholera epidemic in Memphis (1867) in which she lost her husband and children; then came the Chicago fire (1871) in which she lost all her worldly goods. In the grim days following the fire, Mary has her first encounter with a union called the Knights of Labor and she volunteered to help them.

At this point, Mary was 34 years old, but poverty and hardship had aged her. When her fellow workers began to affectionately refer to her as “Mother,” she gradually realized that the term gave her authority. Bit by bit, she began to acquire qualities that drew others to her: maternal, loyal and dependable. She learned to stand in saloons with “the boys,” matching them drink for drink.

She spoke their language and since she came from a similar background, she could speak of her experiences with arrogant land owners and greedy factory managers; when she realized that such stories struck a common chord with unemployed workers, she learned to embellish her tales for effect. And when she saw that her grey hairs gave her power, she added almost a decade to her age.

In time, Mary Jones became Mother Jones, a fearless old lady who possessed both remarkable reserves of energy and a gift for oratory. When desperate workers, literally reduced to starvation, confronted the managers of factories, Mother Jones led the march. When the DuPonts, the Armours and the Morgans rejected their demands for 8-hour work days and the abolishment of child labor, Mother Jones called them “bloodsuckers” and denounced them from hundreds of platforms. When the managers hired an armed militia that fired on unarmed strikers, Mother Jones rallied the workers and returned to confront management again. Eventually, she became the voice of abused workers everywhere and once led a “children’s march to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt where she camped outside his gates. Roosevelt, like a more recent president, refused to see her or respond to her appeal.

For better than forty years, this incredible woman marched through coalmines, factories and railroad yards, denouncing child labor, company stores, payment by script, and unsafe working conditions in West Virginia coal towns, Colorado mining camps and the railroad slums of Pennsylvania. On these occasions, she lived with the strikers, ate with them and walked with them to their jobs (or strike sites) each day. As time went on, her indifference to personal safety and her willingness to confront armed goons caused her to be labeled “the most dangerous woman in America.” Indeed, at times she seemed half in love with the possibility of martyrdom.

In retrospect Gorn notes that Mother Jones rarely won significant concessions. Time and time again, “her boys” were forced to return to jobs where they endured the same injustices. Gorn’s careful documentation demonstrates that in the early 20th century, the forces of industry had become so powerful, they virtually ran the country. Certainly, they elected presidents, owned the major newspapers, appointed judges and reduced state governors to status of puppets. Yet, there is little doubt that Mother Jones initiated change. Once such issues as child labor and unsafe working conditions were raised, they would not go away.

Gorn concludes that Mary Jones, the seamstress and teacher “invented” Mother Jones, a charismatic figure that spoke for millions. He concludes that she was sometimes fallible and used her position to criticize anything that displeased her, including suffragettes, ministers (“sky pilots”) and the Salvation Army. At times, she gave rants that were filled with egotistical bombast, and she often played fast and loose with “the facts.”

On the advent of her 100th birthday, it is quite likely that Mother Jones was actually a mere 92. Perhaps a woman named Mary Jones was trapped inside “the most dangerous woman in America;” if so, Mary relished every moment of it. In the final analysis, whatever her shortcomings, Mother Jones captured the hearts and improved the lives of millions — workers who called themselves “Mother Jones’ children.”

The Missing by Tim Gautreaux. Knopf Double Publishing Group, 2009. 384 pages.

This is a novel that seems to vibrate in your hands. It is filled with sounds, smells and the bittersweet beauty of a vanquished time — the Mississippi on a moonlit night as the Ambassador, an aging four-decker steamboat, churns slowly downstream occasionally shattering the night with its strident whistle. The heart of the ship contains a vast Texas dance floor where more than 1,000 dancers can alternately sway and swing to blues and jazz. It is the golden age of riverboats (circa 1920s), a time when crowds stood expectantly on the docks of a hundred towns along the Mississippi, waiting for a grand old steamer that would sweep them from their dull lives into a night filled with music and laughter.

But, I’m getting ahead of the story. First, we must bring our hero home from the threats of a deserted (but heavily mined) battlefield in France and a fateful meeting with a frightened child whose face haunts his dreams.

Gautreaux’s protagonist, “Lucky” Sam Simonaux, returned from WWI to his wife and his personal dream job — the floorwalker in Krines, a gigantic New Orleans department store, a place where he has learned to move with grace and efficiency through each of the four floors, watching for shoplifters, drunks and trouble. He does his job well; life is good and the future is bright until ... the day a 3-year-old child, Lily Weller, is kidnapped from Krines. Despite the fact that Sam is injured in his attempt to stop the kidnappers, he is held responsible by his employer and is fired.

In truth, Sam broods about his failure to save Lily, and decides to launch his own search — a decision that leads him to leave his wife in New Orleans and seek employment on the Ambassador where the child’s parents, Ted and Elsie Weller, are employed as musicians. Sam’s logic is that Lily was stolen by someone who saw her performing with her parents (the 3-year-old has been taught to dance and sing) on the old steamboat at one of the river towns. That turns out to be a vast area that runs from Louisiana to Ohio.

For almost six months, Sam fails to find a trace of Lily; however, in the meantime, he becomes an accomplished pianist and learns to love the Ambassador’s special blend of funky jazz and blues. Then, abruptly, a series of random events (including an observant ticket clerk) leads Sam to Lily’s abductors — a wealthy, childless couple, Willa and Acy White, who had employed a degenerate family of outlaws, the Skadlocks, to steal Lily.

In the months following the kidnapping, the Whites have attempted to create another identity for the child. They shower Lily with presents, rename her “Madeline” and strive to convince her that her parents are dead. As the months pass, Lily’s memory of her parents begins to fade, and she begins to change, acquiring the opinions and prejudices of her “new parents.”

Eventually, Sam Simonaux finds himself forced to make a decision that has tragic results. Ted, Lily’s father, becomes impatient with Sam’s cautious investigation of the Skadlocks and ventures into the wilderness where the outlaws live. It is a trip that costs him his life. Eventually, Sam finds his way to the home of Lily’s abductors. However, upon secretly witnessing their wealth, he begins to feel that Lily has advantages and a future that her natural parents could never provide. Instead of confronting her abductors and reclaiming the child, Sam decides to returns to the Ambassador and tells the grieving mother that his lead to Lily had turned out to be a wild goose chase. It is only after Sam’s return to New Orleans that he confesses the truth to his wife; she forces him to tell Lily’s mother the truth. Both Elsie and her son, August, are outraged and demand that Sam help them get Lily back.

Finally, Sam, now repentant of his mistake, takes Lily’s brother, August, and makes a desperate journey to confront the Whites. Ironically, in the meanwhile, the Skadlocks have stolen Lily again, confident that the Whites cannot report the second kidnapping without revealing their part in the initial abduction. Their intention is to sell Lily to the Whites again! In the ensuing events, Sam finally rescues Lily and returns her to her mother, but it is a belated reunion. Within a few months, Elsie Weller will die in an influenza epidemic. It also becomes evident that the lapse of time (almost a year) has done Lily considerable harm.

At this point, The Missing undergoes an astonishing change. Tim Gautreaux does not bring his novel to a conclusion, but adds a second plot that expands and enriches the original. Throughout the search for Lily Weller, Sam Simonaux has frequently behaved in a perplexing manner. His ambiguous attitude toward parent-child relationships acquires significance when Sam reveals a secret and undertakes yet another journey.

When Sam Simonaux was six months old, his entire family was murdered by a savage band of outlaws. Sam escaped only because his father threw him into an old stove just before a virtual hurricane of bullets destroyed the house and killed his parents and his brothers and sister. His Uncle Claude found Sam in the stove the following day and raised him. For all of his life, “Lucky Sam” had felt a strange detachment about his family’s fate.

However, with the death of Lily’s parents, he feels an impulse to confront his own tragedy. Now, he returns to talk to his Uncle Claude and learn the truth about his family’s massacre; he will then go to confront the murderers, the Cloats: a family so bestial, their crimes are legendary.

Although the journey to reclaim Lily (who has much in common with the face that has always haunted Lucky Sam’s dreams) is tense and suspenseful, Sam’s final journey is riveting. It is not only a journey for justice, it is also an odyssey of self-discovery. When this last confrontation is over, Sam will return to claim the only object his father left him — a violin. He will also claim his adopted daughter, Lily, and he will devote the rest of his life striving to restore the gift of music that he knows is within her.

(Gary Carden of Sylva is a playwright, an author and has been awarded the North Carolina Folklore Award. He can be reached This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

William Dudley Pelley by Scott Beckman. Syracuse University Press. 269 pages.

The first time I heard the name William Dudley Pelley, a friend of mine was telling me about an Asheville-based oral history project that he had launched. He said that while he was interviewing elderly Jews in a retirement community about their lives in Asheville during the 1930s, one of the participants exclaimed, “I remember watching that SOB Pelley marching with his Silver Shirts down Charlotte Street!” When my friend asked him who he was talking about, the excited fellow rushed out of the room and returned in a few moments with a “Wanted” poster. There was a photograph of Pelley, bedecked in his silver shirt, a dapper little man in a Van Dyke beard. Beneath the photo was an impressive list of charges, including fraud, sedition and “Un-American activities.”

Scott Beckman’s biography of Pelley might prove to be something of a revelation for the American public who remember his well-publicized trials (Washington, North Carolina and Indiana courts). Charged with sedition by the Martin Dies Committee (Un-American Activities committee of Congress) for his racist and anti-Semitic activities, Pelley was denounced, reviled and finally imprisoned. By the 1950s, the nationally known “Asheville Fascist and Madman,” was not only forgotten, his life and his writings seemed to have virtually vanished without a trace.

After his death in 1965, family members and devoted followers made some notable attempts to restore Pelly’s badly damaged reputation by reissuing some of his extensive (and less controversial) writings — especially those dealing with spiritualism, metaphysics and the significance of unidentified flying objects! Certainly, there is more to this man than his much-publicized Neo-Nazi activity in the 1930s.

Born in Lynn, Mass., on March 12, 1890, Pelley was the only son of a poor Methodist minister. Despite an unstable home life, William did well in school and quickly demonstrated a remarkable talent for writing. (He published his first newspaper at the age of 12 and was editing the weekly Springfield Homestead at the age of 19.) The utopian novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy had a profound influence on the young journalist and prompted him to write a series of articles in which he denounced churches (they did nothing to help the poor). He also repeatedly attacked capitalism and privately owned industry (which he thought should be owned by the government).

Shortly after his marriage, Pelley moved to Vermont, bought a comfortable home and incurred a number of debts. After the death of his first child, he found himself saddled with more debts (medical expenses), and turned to writing fiction as a means of supplementing his salary. He was good at it. Not only did he become solvent, he quickly developed a reputation as a promising young writer. During the next decade, he published more than 200 short stories and won several prestigious awards, including the O’Henry Award in 1920.

Emboldened by his luck with magazine fiction, Pelley tried his luck with film scripts. Again, he was successful and wrote numerous scripts for the silent film industry, becoming a close friend of the actor Lon Chaney, “the man of a thousand faces.” However, it is during his sojourn in Hollywood that Pelley developed a bitter resentment of Jewish studio moguls. As time went on, Pelley’s anger hardened into a form of anti-Semitism that was so intense it would become a major component of his social and political life.

On a trip to Russia and Japan, sponsored by the Methodist Episcopal Church (purportedly to find sites for future missions) Pelley became convinced that the world was threatened by two evils: Jews and Communism. As he traveled through Russia, Korea and Japan — parts of which had been devastated by recent wars — he became convinced that all of the misery he saw could be traced to a great Jewish-Communist conspiracy. Their ultimate goal was world dominion, and Pelley vowed that he would use his talents to rally the forces of Aryans and Christians and prepare for a holy war.

Shortly after his return to the United States, Pelly allegedly experienced a spiritual revelation that made him famous. In a pamphlet entitled “Seven Minutes in Eternity,” Pelley claimed that he was lifted from his corporal body and conversed with a “Divine Being” that revealed the future of the world to him, as well as his role In preparing for Christ’s Second Coming. Pelley claimed that he returned to his earthly form with great reluctance, but the Divine Being told him that he had a lot of work to do in Buncombe County preparing for the Apocalypse.

Pelley spent the next decade in developing a convoluted, and complex political theory, much of which he claimed was “dictated” to him by spiritual beings. Alternating between rabid rants about Jewish spies (Roosevelt was one) and social-political diatribes which defined the new era (cities would be demolished and American citizens would live in pastoral settings; blacks and Jews would be denied citizenship and would live in “restricted areas;” Pelley published hundreds of periodicals, magazines and directives. Continuing to claim to be both a telepathist and clairvoyant (he could converse with spirits and travel to heavenly spheres), he became an ardent spiritualist and often participated in séances in which he claimed to converse with Jesus, Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington (who told Pelley that he “looked forward to shaking his hand someday.”) In conjunction with all of this, he launched a political-military organization called the Silver Legion of America (based in Asheville) and sought to align himself with Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany.

When the Dies Committee convened in Washington in 1939, many witnesses noted that the atmosphere bordered on paranoia. At the time there were several hundred “suspect” organizations that received subpoenas, many of which were far more militant and “un-American” than William Dudley Pelley. However, the Silver Shirt leader’s belligerence (he had ignored the initial summons) and his repeated attacks on Roosevelt and the “Jew Deal” sparked considerable anger from the Committee members. He was sentenced to 15 years and his property was confiscated. Despite numerous appeals, he remained in prison until 1950.

Pelley died on July 1, 1965. Since he had been enjoined against indulging in political affairs after his release from prison, he spent the last 15 years of his life promoting a spiritual/metaphysical organization called Soulcraft. Still an avid séance participant (and a clairvoyant), he allegedly spent much of his last years in conversing with Nostradamus, the 16th century seer and physician. According to Pelley, the two men had much in common.

Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams. New York Review of Books, 1960 reissued 2007. 274 pages.

For those of us who truly love books, our greatest pleasures are often derived from discovering the “neglected classics” — remarkable books that somehow manage to pass under our personal radar. In the great deluge of novels that have flooded this country for the past 50 years, it is not surprising to discover that many distinguished works were published with little or no fanfare — they fade quietly, unnoticed by either the critics or the media.

Well, it is gratifying to learn that somebody noticed John Williams and lifted his three novels (Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner and Augustus) from obscurity. (The New York Review of Books is devoted to finding “lost or missed” classics). Although the Denver-based author of Butcher’s Crossing died in 1994, his works are being re-evaluated (and critically acclaimed). Almost 50 years after their publication, his works continue to attract attention. Current critics compare Butcher’s Crossing to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and graduate students are finding the novels of John Williams on their required reading lists.

Butcher’s Crossing is a western. The setting is the 1870s when Will Andrews arrives in the raw and primitive town of Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas. A Harvard graduate and a fervent admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Andrews is on a spiritual quest. He wants to encounter Nature in its most brutal aspect (“bloody in tooth and claw”) so that he can merge, or “become One” with it.

Essentially, this is the clichéd beginning of a hundred potboilers: the eastern “tenderfoot” confronts a daunting “rites of passage,” but his innate courage and moral principles enables him to survive. He emerges hardened and confident, ready to take his place among the stalwart natives of the rugged west.

However, Will Andrews is destined to encounter a dark and brutal world that bears no resemblance to Emerson’s precepts. His six-month ordeal as a member of a buffalo hunting party not only change his perceptions of the natural world; it also affords him with the dubious opportunity to experience a dark and mindless violence that has much in common with Joseph Conrad’s descent into the heart of darkness.

When Andrews arrives in Butcher’s Crossing, he makes the belated discovery that the great buffalo hunts are virtually over. (The fashion craze in the East for buffalo coats has diminished and customers are complaining about the “smell that they can’t get rid of.”) The surrounding prairie is littered with thousands of bone piles that the local farmers are slowly converting to fertilizer. However, by chance, he meets Miller, a buffalo hunter who tells him of a remote valley in Colorado where an enormous herd grazes peacefully. Using his inheritance, Andrews offers to finance a hunting expedition, on the condition that he is included in the party.

Thus begins a journey into an immense wilderness; yet it is a transitory world that is forever altered by the passage of these men who seem to have a desire to destroy everything they see. In addition to Miller and Andrews, the hunting party includes Charlie Hoge, a one-handed alcoholic with a penchant for quoting scripture, and Fred Schneider, an angry, taciturn man who glares at world around him with contempt. Hoge is a gifted cook and driver; Schneider is a skinner. Miller promises that they will return with several thousand hides — enough to make them all wealthy.

The journey is memorable. The author’s ability to describe natural phenomena, a terrifying snowstorm, thirst, drought and the immensity of the natural world is remarkable. However, I feel that John Williams’ real purpose is to demolish the “myth of the West.” The author does not describe a primitive world where men are ennobled by travail and hazardous encounters. Instead, he takes his tenderfoot to the brink of an abyss where he glimpses the mindless and destructive violence in his own heart.

Dying Light by Donald Hays. MacAdam/Cage, 2006. 261 pages

In recent years, I’m sure that the average reader feels intimidated by the steady onslaught of new publications that flow into the bookstores each day. (I also hear that all of this excess may cease soon as publishing houses close.) Given the sheer mass of novels, plays, poetry collections and biographies that appear each week, I am often eager for guidance. One of my favorite ploys is to ask a reader whose judgment I respect, “What are you reading these days?”

For a couple of years now, I have been asking my favorite writer, Ron Rash, and he always takes the time to give me a few titles. “Read Out Stealing Horses,” he tells me. I do and I love it. “Read Dirt Music,” he adds. “Read everything that Donald Harrington has written. Read William Gay and Cormac McCarthy.” About a month ago, he said, “Read Dying Light.” In my opinion, Ron never misses, and this time, he exceeded all expectations.

Dying Light is a collection of 10 short stories that are so beautifully crafted, I found myself deeply affected by the author’s skill. Each time, as the story concludes, the various components slide together effortlessly like the interlocking pieces of a musical instrument, a fiddle or a dulcimer. However, these stories are harsh and uncompromising in their insight. Each tale, even the comical “Private Dance,” deals with the consequences of bad decisions — lives wrecked by human frailty, obsession and betrayal.

“The Rites of Love” chronicles a passion that refuses to die — even when a football injury reduces Monty Shepherd to an invalid and his high school sweetheart, Elizabeth, marries another and has a son. The two thwarted lovers still strive to re-create their single night together. As the years pass and Monty’s health deteriorates, their bond intensifies. (The conclusion of this story is a stunner!)

In “Akerman in Eden,” a mentally unstable poet finds himself vacillating between two worlds: a motel room in Oklahoma and the sacred temple of Ophir near the river Euphrates. In the real world (the motel room), he is at the mercy of strangers who have stolen his credit cards, but without his medication, Akerman yearns to join an exotic caravan that is moving toward Eden. Akerman’s dilemma suggests that sometimes madness is preferable to reality.

Angler, the distraught protagonist of “Salvage” finds himself sitting in a hospital room with his dying wife while he yearns for a lost love — Sara, who rejected him 58 years ago. He feels compelled to leave his grieving family and drive to Sara’s home. He feels attempts to confront his lost love — now a widow with impaired hearing who lives in a junkyard. Like many of Hays’ characters, Angler is about to experience the consequences of obsession.

“Why He Did It” deals with Wilder, a doting father who takes desperate steps to assure his son’s future. Realizing that the daughter of the woman he has married has fallen in love with his son, Justin (thereby posing a threat to Justin’s college career), Wilder devises a plan that will assure his son’s future. It works, but it has unforeseen and tragic results.

Three of the stories in this collection, “Redemption,” “Material” and “Dying Light” deal with commonplace domestic dramas: abandonment, deceit and the belated (but sincere) need for forgiveness.

Frank Wheeler cannot forgive his father for abandoning his mother and broods about it continually. When the penitent father returns (with a young wife) eager to make amends, Frank (much like Wilder in “Why He Did It”) devises a scheme to render justice and protect the innocent. It works, but it places the vindictive son forever beyond the pale of redemption.

When Harper, the elderly creative writing instructor, is caught in an affair with Erin, one of his students, he confesses his adultery and assumes responsibility for the tragic consequences. However, after his wife divorces him, and Erin moves to Paris and becomes a successful writer (who has written a series of sensational stories based on her affair with Harper), he realizes that he has been “material” for Erin’s novel. Erin has heeded his quote from Henry James, “A writer is one on whom nothing is lost.”

This collection’s title, Dying Light, comes from Hays’ final short story which, despite the somber setting, qualifies as a tale that acquires a kind of redemptive beauty. Bud McMahon is dying, and as the cancer spreads in his throat he bargains with the radiologists for two more months of life. In that interim, he starts smoking again, and is reunited with his son (an artist who paints his father’s portrait). As the dying Bud sits watching the sunset, he thinks, “Still, the sun — an old glory of dying light. It is beautiful. It is almost enough.”