Fiction review: Burning Bright

By: JON SEALY SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | Times-Dispatch
Published: April 18, 2010

FICTION
For years, Ron Rash has been mining southern Appalachia for great stories.

As a young writer, he wrote narrative poems about life in a textile mill, about the flooding of a river valley, about the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. In the past 10 years, he has earned national success for a series of novels that cover similar ground, most recently with 2008's masterful "Serena," about a ruthless couple's timber mining operation in the 1920s. "Serena" ends with an apocalyptic image of a landscape stripped of its trees and left for dead.

Rash's new collection of stories, "Burning Bright," is a fitting follow-up to that image, taking a sharp look at a series of stunned lives in lower Appalachia.

Set mainly in western North Carolina, these stories range from the wife of a "Lincolnite" -- a Southerner fighting for the North in the Civil War -- to contemporary meth addiction.

The characters bring to mind President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "forgotten man" or Tom Joad's "I'll be there" speech. In one way or another, all the characters struggling against forces emerging in the modern world.

"I never thought things could ever get like this," says a character whose son has succumbed to a terrible meth addiction. "The world, I just don't understand it no more."

The collection opens with "Hard Times," a Depression-era story of a family trying to figure out why eggs keep disappearing every night from the coop. The wife suggests to a neighbor that his dog might be the culprit, and the neighbor, out of pride, slits the dog's throat.

In the title story, a woman, who fears her husband might be committing arson during a severe drought, ruminates on her father. Though not a superstitious man, her father had once "killed a black snake himself and placed it on a fence, then fallen to his knees in his scorched cornfield, imploring whatever entity would listen to bring rain."

These are stories with high tension and chiseled prose. In "Dead Confederates," two men dig up Confederate graves in search of medals or sabers they can sell. When an old caretaker shows up at 3 a.m. with a shotgun, the grave robbers are shoulder-deep in a grave and are faced with a reckoning reminiscent of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown."

Another story, "Into the Gorge," centers on an older protagonist who, while gathering ginseng in a state forest, has a chilling confrontation with a cocky young park ranger. Later that evening, "It seemed like he'd been running a week's worth of nights, but he saw the stars hadn't begun to pale."

The real pleasure of these stories is that Rash takes such care with his language. He describes the "icy caul" of a river as a returning soldier remembers being shot during the war -- "a sensation like a metal fist hitting the side of his helmet."

At the heart of the language is always character. A woman who lost a son in childbirth has the painful realization that "there is not a single soul on earth who could tell her the color of her son's eyes." And whether these characters are struggling against the forces of the economy or breaking the law, Rash always treats them with dignity. For that, these stories are heartrending and beautiful.

Jon Sealy is a copywriter for The Times-Dispatch. He has an MFA from Purdue, and his fiction has appeared in Freight Stories and the South Carolina Review.