Excellent collection! If you like Flannery O'Connor or David Joy, you will most likely enjoy these. ( )

Ieder verhaal is goed, maar vooral het verhaal "Those who are Dead are only now forgiven" heeft mij erg aangegrepen.
Het zou kunnen dat het komt omdat ik zelf een "country girl" ben, maar er is iets in de verstilde sfeer en de tragiek in sommige van de verhalen,dat duidelijk bij mij binnenkomt. ( )

Appalachian Country-Noir Shorts
Review of the Ecco hardcover edition (February 2013)

I read GR friend Jim’s review of Nothing Gold Can Stay and was especially curious about the references to the ambiguous endings which are apparently the author’s regular style. I hadn’t read Rash’s fiction before, but I noticed that he had written an Introduction to one of my favourite American Civil War novels Woe to Live on (1987)* by Daniel Woodrell. Woodrell is otherwise mostly known for his country-noir writing style. I think that genre name was even coined with Woodrell’s books in mind.

Jim’s review included references to where some of the stories had appeared in magazines and journals. I was thus able to quickly sample The Trusty, The New Yorker, May 23, 2011 and The Woman at the Pond, Southern Review. Autumn 2010 (not available online) & at Kill Your Darlings, October 2011 (available online).

Those samples definitely left the impression that Rash’s writing was also in the country noir type of genre so I was quick to source the book from the Toronto Public Library. I was not disappointed and it likely helped that I knew in advance the stories required the reader to provide their own conclusions. I’m more forgiving about this in short stories. It is the longer novels where the writer can’t be bothered to properly solve their own mystery that anger me the most and cause me to pull out the 1-star take down reviews and the Unsatisfactory Ending Alert ™ warnings.

Star ratings and brief plot summaries are below. The average came in at 3.5 (so rounded up to 4 for Library Thing). To be honest the lower 1 to 2 star ratings of some stories were simply because I didn’t like the characters and aren’t a reflection of the story’s quality.

1. The Trusty ****. A prison trusty on a chain gang attempts to enlist a farmer’s wife in an escape plan.
2. Nothing Gold Can Stay **. Two n’er-do-wells needing drug money, burglar the house of an old man whom they had previously worked for on a summer job.
3. Something Rich and Strange *****. A young girl dies through an accidental drowning, a diver is reluctant to recover her body.
4. Cherokee ****. A couple has to earn $1,000 at a casino to prevent repossession of their truck.
5. Where the Map Ends ***. Two escaped slaves have a fateful encounter with a farmer.
6. A Servant of History *****. A folk music researcher puts himself in peril while collecting old Scottish ballads from Appalachian Scots descendants.
7. Twenty-Six Days ****. Two parents work at double shifts of cleaning and serving jobs to save extra money for their daughter who is due to come home from army deployment.
8. A Sort of Miracle ****. Two couch surfer brothers agree to help their superior attitude brother in law on an illegal bear hunt. The in-law is only doing it for the supposed sexual function properties of the bear organ parts.
9. Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven **. A university student attempts to rescue his old girlfriend from drug addiction.
10. The Magic Bus *. Creepy hippies try to lure a naïve girl into joining their wanderings.
11. The Dowry ***. An implacable future father-in-law makes a bizarre demand of his daughter’s suitor.
12. The Woman at the Pond ***. Two local men are hired to drain a pond.
13. Night Hawks *****. After an accident leaves her disfigured, a woman leaves her fiancé and takes a job as the midnight to dawn disk jockey at a radio station.
14. Three A.M. and the Stars Were Out ****. A retired veterinarian still goes out on middle-of-the-night house calls from his old farm customers.

*Also the basis for the severely under-rated film adaptation Ride With the Devil (1999) dir. Ang Lee.

Excellent take on gritty Appalachia. ( )

Wow, these are great stories about matters bleak and realistic. Ranging from the civil war (where a man and his want to be son in law fought on different sides) to present day problems of escaping the life you’re dealt, Rash has exposed a section of the country not usually explored, similar to Steinbeck relating the stories of Cannery Row. There are noble characters, (vets and pastors and struggling teens, ) and there are miscreants, (hippies, meth heads, old men with war grudges,) but mostly there are people struggling against the life they inherited.
Excerp example:
"Denton felt better as soon as he left the truck. Being that close to his brothers-in-law made him feel like a fungus was starting to grow on him. They both had a moldy sort of smell, like mushrooms. Which was no surprise, since Baroque and Marlboro moved about as much as mushrooms. They never left the house, and got up from the couch only to eat or go to the bathroom. Hell, mushrooms probably did more than that. They actually grow. They were finding nutrients, some kind of work was going on down there in the soil.” ( )