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But You Still Have To Live With It
A Review of Scott Blackburn’s It Dies With You By Wiley Reiver Good crime novels are never really only about a crime. I’ll go further: Great crime novels aren’t even primarily about legal wrongdoing, its motivations and consequences for perpetrators and victims. The story of the impoverished St. Petersburg student with his borrowed axe and…
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We Are All Made of Stars
A review of Jordan Harper’s The Last King of California By Justin Lee “See a scar of smoke across the belly of the sky.” That ominous opening line brings us into Jordan Harper’s The Last King of California. At the offset we are introduced to Beast Daniels, the big bad with bolts that is killing…
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Horror in the Hills
A review of C.W. Blackwell’s Song of the Red Squire By Chris McGinley There’s a renewed interest in folk horror out there! In literature, film, and television, artists are resuscitating the sub-genre . . . or maybe it never left us. Either way, it’s popular again. Like any genre, there will always be debate about…
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Gould Climbs Out of the Saddle
A review of Scott Gould’s The Hammerhead Chronicles By Jon Sokol Prize-winning author Scott Gould has a unique way of taking diverse characters found in everyday life and shoving them together in unbelievable, yet somehow awkwardly familiar circumstances to create stories filled with wickedly sharp humor, heart-rending grief, and soulful observations on the human condition.…
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Everything That Sinks Must Emerge
A Review of Kelly J. Ford’s Real Bad Things By Wiley Reiver As I made my way through Kelly J. Ford’s stellar second novel, I kept thinking of how much Flannery O’Connor would have enjoyed and appreciated this story. Now, stay with me here. I’m entirely confident that as an artist with a cogent, comprehensive…
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Brutal and Beautiful
A REview of CHarles Dodd White’s Lambs of Men By Chris McGinley Novelist Charles Dodd White knows the Appalachian mountainside. He knows the flora, the fauna, the geography. He knows the waterways and the weather. He knows how the light hits the trees at different times of day, and the way the air of the…
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It Never Leaves
A review of Curtis Ippolito’s Burying the Newspaper Man By Justin Lee There is a line from a City & Colour song that kept coming to mind while reading this story. It goes: “A haunted man who can’t outrun his ghosts. They’re in my skin and my bones.” I feel like that is a perfect…
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Brothers in Harms
A Review of Mark Westmoreland’s A Mourning Song By Wiley Reiver Mark Westmoreland’s A Mourning Song, (Shotgun Honey, 2023) the sequel to his gritty, snarling A Violent Gospel, explores the consequences of violence and loss in a way not often found in genre fiction. To be sure, this second story about Mack and Marshall Dooley…
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Sin & Righteousness in Appalachia
a review of Michael Amos Cody’s A Twilight Reel by Chris McGinley Michael Amos Cody’s A Twilight Reel is simply one of the finest collections of Appalachian short stories around. In its breadth, and in its subtle evocation of theme, it recalls the work of Chris Holbrook, Chris Offutt, or Ann Pancake. Indeed, the twelve…
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The Second Eve
A Review of Addie Tsai’s Unwieldy Creatures By Alex Carrigan Humanity has been caught in a cycle of creation and destruction since the beginning of time. We have many tales of humans being consumed by their creations or their creations causing death and destruction in the wake of their creator’s ideal. Whether it’s Pygmalion creating…