Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl Ann Hite’s Where the Souls Go is subtitled “A Black Mountain Novel.” It’s the third in her series of novels rooted in this complicated, mystical, wispy place. For the geographically challenged, North Carolina’s Black Mountain is part of the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains region, old mountains steeped in mystery […]
“Over the Plain Houses,” by Julia Franks
July 12, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl The title for Julia Franks’s novel is drawn from an Anne Sexton poem, “Her Kind”: “I have gone out, a possessed witch, / haunting the black air, braver at night; / dreaming evil, I have done my hitch /over the plain houses, light by light . . . .” The […]
“The Cigar Factory: A Novel of Charleston,” by Michele Moore
June 28, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl I recall my first visit to Charleston a year or so after Hurricane Hugo. Driving south to north along the coastal roads, I made side trips into the South Carolina Low Country where I found isolation and the remnants of the Gullah people. I had been unbeknownst driving along and […]
“Friday Afternoon and Other Stories,” by T. D. Johnston
June 15, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl The phrase “twilight zone” has likely become iconic in American culture. Episodes from the television series contained elements of drama, suspense or horror, and aspects of the macabre. Gauntlet Press has published collections of original “The Twilight Zone” scripts, some with Rod Serlings’s hand-written edits. A former student of mine […]
“Where There Are Two Or More,” by Elizabeth Genovise
May 17, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl The thirteen stories in Elizabeth Genovise’s Where There Are Two Or More are set in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. It’s her second collection and a marked advance in craft and theme from her first collection, A Different Harbor. The stories are beautifully intimate, intensely direct, and evidence as to […]
“Suburban Gospel,” by Mark Beaver
April 27, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Reviewed by Daniel James Sundahl Mark Beaver’s Suburban Gospel is one more memoir of an adolescent wandering toward adulthood, a Bible Belt Baptist southern version of Roth’s Portnoy but without the gnawing sense of psychological guilt expiated on the analyst’s couch. It is, on the other hand, exuberantly “guilt-edged,” the saga of a young man […]