Burning Bright: Stories

No other writer in America can show us that instant when a desperate heart breaks in stories at once stark and tender like Ron Rash does. His characters are sometimes aware that they are on the edge of sanity or that they are about to make a painful discovery, but they just as often miss the moment and know that another chance for redemption may never again pause for their hesistant grasp. They are caught up in drifts of fate and cannot remember making that first misstep, they make bad decisions and spend their rueful lives wishing their deeds undone, or they realize that no one lives a simple life, that every passing moment is another loss, and that the only viable responses may be to laugh, perform a small act of kindness, and try to endure. Despite the grim and sometimes violent circumstances in which his stories emerge, Rash has an amazing sense of humor. Who else can make you laugh about meth addicts who rob their families, men who would rather see his children starve than accept a handout, and thieves desecrating confederate graves? This is an extraordinary collection of stories that will make your own imagination burn bright.

I think Ron Rash is such a fine writer, with an elegance that belies the grittiness of his stories. He obviously knows his subject matter well and is able to make us feel his characters' pain and the toughness of their lives. His stories all have a strong sense of place and show his years of Appalachian heritage. Imbued with a quiet beauty, each story paints a complete picture. His beautiful and lyrical language just grabs the reader and does not let go. Here is something that just was so touching: "He imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn't be found, shacks where families lived who didn't even have one swaybacked milk cow. He imagined cities where blood stained the sidewalks beneath buildings tall as ridges. He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was." The stories in this book span the time from the Civil War through the present time and touch on a variety of subjects: poverty, family, job loss. Each story shows its characters' fortitude and endurance...and the grace with which they carry on every day.

The characters in Ron Rash's new collection of stories are country people. Some still live on the home place, some are a generation removed residing in nearby small towns. His country, and theirs, is Appalachia -- Virginia, the Carolinas, the Blue Ridge and the Great Smokey mountains. He knows these people well, knows what keeps them in place and what holds them down. Most of them are in a bad way, out of work, broke, in trouble at home, crossways with the sheriff, the boss, the park police. They are gritty, resentful of authority and willing to resort to self-help to head off the law, the bank, the prying neighbor. In "Back of Beyond" and in "The Ascent," two of the most affecting stories in the collection, Rash combs through the family wreckage caused by crystal meth addiction. The stories create a fictional bridge to Nick Redding's 2009 book-length treatment of the epidemic, "Methland: The Death and Life of An American Small Town." In "Dead Confederates," the reenactment boys get their comeuppance and in "Lincolnites," a Confederate soldier forages at his own risk when he takes on a young farm wife with Union sympathies. Impressed as I am by the stark realism of and dark humor in these stories, I longed for a tall tale or two on the order of "Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes," the opening story in "Chemistry and Other Stories," Rash's 2007 collection. Next time, perhaps. Finally, a word to the squeamish. Save "Hard Times," the first story in the book, for last. It is such a disquieting metaphor for the deprivation endured by so many Americans in the current recession that you might be discouraged from reading the others and there is not one story here that you will want to skip.

This superb intense twelve story collection focuses on the people of Appalachia who though impoverished refuse to give up their pride even as they seek a shimmer of happiness. The well written stories are very short with the longest being 30 pages; yet each goes deep baring the darkness of the soul with slight flickers of light that sputter allegorically. Opening with "Hard Times" in which a Depression Era farmer's wife insists the impoverished neighbors' dog is stealing their eggs; when confronted the patriarch neighbor slices the throat of his canine to prove he was not the thief. Fishing for the felon proves shockingly successful. In sixteen pages, Ron Rash provides a cast of poor people struggling with survival but doing so with pride. That theme is throughout the anthology whether it is the young turning to meth "Back of Beyond" in which a pawn shop owner knows who the addicts are as they are his best customers including his nephew. "The Ascent" focuses on a tweener who makes a family with corpses in a crashed plane he finds. Whether he centers on the Civil War with "Dead Confederates" and "Lincolnites", the Great Depression ("Hard Times") or the present, Mr. Nash provides his readers with a profound look at the people of Appalachia where pride and hard work battle poverty and drugs. Harriet Klausner

I think Ron Rash is one of the great writers of his generation, this powerful collection set against the landscape of the rugged Appalachians and a people whose identity is married to their environment. Rash has a masterful command of language ("a big old sow belly that sways side to side when he takes a notion to work") and an instinct for the tales that define his characters. Certainly, that dramatic terrain plays a major role in this collection, a hardscrabble land that demands endurance and breeds stubbornness, the situations that cut to the quick, life and death turning on a moment. Rash understand these people and this place, speaks their terrible truths to the uninitiated, from the God-fearing to the cold-hearted, from the Civil War to the Depression to current days, when methamphetamine has taken on critical mass in decimating a vulnerable population. In "Dead Confederates", a basically honest, but financially hard-pressed man agrees to raid Confederate graves with another in the dark of night, hoping to score enough cash to pay his mother's hospital bills. But this adventure turns sour early on, yielding some reward but a lifetime of vivid nightmares. For me, the first story, "Hard Times" is the most poignant and emotionally stunning, a perfect example of Rash's ability to contrast the morality of necessity when food is scarce. The resolution is illuminating, revealing much about a man and the culprit he discovers stealing eggs from his henhouse at a time when pride and hunger have their own consequences. Rash's adult characters face their decisions with a certain stoicism, but it is the children who leave a lasting imprint, like the young boy in "The Ascent" who discovers two dead bodies frozen in the wreckage of a small aircraft in the Great Smokies. He treasures his booty, only to be confronted by his parents' weakness for the pipe, his only comfort a retreat to the world of fantasy. The scourge of drugs appears again in "Back of Beyond", where a pawnbroker purchases items from a steady stream of addicts only to recognize a gun from his brother's home. A visit to his brother brings a cold dash of reality, a mother shivering in the bitter cold of a ratty trailer, her stubborn defense "that stuff has done made my boy crazy". To read this author's prose is to appreciate the depth and breadth of his appreciation for the people and stories of Appalachia past and present, where character is defined by place and situation and change suspicious and untrustworthy. But even this great repository of American history has been sullied by a deadly drug that leeches the spirit from its victims, as deadly as the plague. Rash knows this history and doles it out in small, pungent bites. Luan Gaines/2010.