One Foot in Eden

If you like Appalachian mountain stories, as I do, you will enjoy this book. I liked the story well enough, but I must warn that the ending is not the happy ending most people look for, so just know that going in. Although, thinking back on the story and what was happening to the land, added together with the tragedy that had occurred earlier on in the story, I understood the author's intent with the ending being the way it is. I will be thinking about this one for a while, and I will definitely be reading more from Ron Rash.

I had read Ron Rash's three books of poetry and found his work extraordinary before I learned that he had also ventured into fiction. Then I became aware of Mr. Rash's two short story collections. I read them and found that this man, whom I had thought to be pure poet, was capable of a lyrical, poetic prose that I found engaging. It had the "feel" of endurance about it. But when I read Mr. Rash's first novel, gulping it down almost in one sitting, I was absolutely convinced that a major talent had come among us. Ron Rash can easily take his place alongside any number of the older, more established, and, alas, even major, novelists of the American South. I await Rash's second novel with bated breath. But I hope he will not forsake poetry. We readers need him in both genres--poetry as well as fiction.

I don't know how to describe this book without giving away too much of the plot. It's a murder mystery, told through the words of several storytellers. Each one knows only what he or she has experienced personally, and each expands the narrative until the reader finally knows exactly what happened, and more importantly, WHY it happened. I read this in nearly one sitting, starting one night until I fell asleep, and finishing the rest the next day...partially by candlelight during the power outage after the recent ice storm here in NC. The characters are wonderful and so real, I feel like I know them and I never questioned their choices. Ron Rash has created a true tragedy, where the behavior of each person is logical and their resultant suffering is inevitable. I can't wait until he writes another book.

Rash proves to be as sure-footed with prose as he is with his poetry. In fact, EDEN does not have the feel of a first novel. Into the mix the writer pours ghostly imagery, mystery, indirect old testament allusions and the great themes of loyalty and moral retribution. The setting is as startlingly real as in Rash's poems of Apalachia. The characters and language are authentic, and the author manages to nail all five of the narrative voices that reveal each layer of the story. ONE FOOT IN EDEN is a fine accomplishment by a man who has already established himself in another genre. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Ron Rash is one of North Carolina's finest poets. Set in the Jocassee Valley in the southern Appalachians, One Foot in Eden is a taut, compelling story of infidelity and revenge killing that has the feel of archetypal mountain legend, a sort of "Lord Randall" updated by a psychological realist. A nifty and quite cunning murder mystery plot is parceled out to readers, Roshomon-style, from the cross-angled, and occasionally contradictory, first-person testimonies of the major players: the high sheriff, who knows murder has been done and who has done it, but can't find a body; the murderer himself; the adulterous wife for whom he kills; the bastard son of the illicit union; the deputy, a sort of Everyman, who serves as the reader's proxy and comes on, like Horatio in Act V, to wonder over the principals' unraveled fates. (There's also a witch!) For me, in some ways, the most compelling character is the Appalachian landscape, which Rash delivers tersely, with a poet's exacting eye and speech. Ultimately, One Foot in Eden is a parable about the pursuit of justice-its elusiveness at the human level, its certainty from the divine. True statement: I read the book-which is only 200 pages-- in a single sitting and couldn't (didn't) put it down.