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Summary
Summary
The characters within these fifteen stories are in one way or another staring into the abyss. While some are awaiting redemption, others are fully complicit in their own undoing.
We come upon them in the mountains of West Virginia, in the backyards of rural North Carolina, and at tourist traps along Route 66, where they smolder with hidden desires and struggle to resist the temptations that plague them.
A Melungeon woman has killed her abusive husband and drives by the home of her son's new foster family, hoping to lure the boy back. An elderly couple witnesses the end-times and is forced to hunt monsters if they hope to survive. A young girl ""tanning and manning"" with her mother and aunt resists being indoctrinated by their ideas about men. A preacher's daughter follows in the footsteps of her backsliding mother as she seduces a man who looks a lot like the devil.
A master of Appalachian dialect and colloquial speech, Monks writes prose that is dark, taut, and muscular, but also beguiling and playful. Monsters in Appalachia is a powerful work of fiction.
Author Notes
Sheryl Monks holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her work has earned the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award and has appeared in the Greensboro Review, Midwestern Gothic, storySouth, Regarding Arts Letters, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Change Seven magazine. Learn more at sherylmonks.com.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Monks knows her monsters, both literal and figurative. And she knows the territory of hills and hollers, where reality is sometimes heightened so sharply that it bleeds into myth. The 15 ferociously compressed stories in her collection sear their way into the reader's brain with matter-of-fact horror. In just six pages, the opening story, "Burning Slag," lets one grim, violent moment in the life of a troubled mother point to a future shimmering with brutal shocks. Monks (All the Girls in France) follows it up with the wrenching "Robbing Pillars," a claustrophobic coal-mining tale with a touch of the supernatural. These stories sparkle with dark, extreme humor, such as "Nympho," in which the relatively law-abiding son of Amway-dealing parents finds himself under the sway of a fellow middle schooler given to "throwing his lanky white arms into wild frog punches." Others are naturalistic: a novel's worth of family and community relationships are fitted into "Little Miss Bobcat." And with the title story, the final one in the collection, Monks ventures deep into the realm of myth, for a satisfying vision of the intersection of the momentous and the everyday. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A varied cast of mothers, miners, school kids, and mountain folk grapple with desire, poverty, and, yes, even monsters in 15 stories set across Appalachia. Monks stories are so wide-rangingfrom all-too-real portrayals of the horrors of adolescence to deep dives into the fantasticalthat theyre difficult to classify as a whole. What most of them have in common are characters trying to do the best they can in a landscape often dark and unforgiving. In the opening story, Burning Slag, [1] a woman who's lost her son to foster care spies on him from her car and employs a most disturbing strategy to try to get him back. Told in retrospect, Merope [106] is about a young mans kind-of-sweet, kind-of-mean-spirited flirtation with a girl who wasnt much to look at. [106] Poverty is a theme throughout. In Little Miss Bobcat, [92] a young girl hopes to win a genuine quartz crown [93] by soliciting the most contributions for her school fundraiser, despite her familys own lack of money. An encounter between a shop owner and a mother using food stamps to buy groceries is the seemingly mundane premise behind the masterful Clinch. [77] While many of the stories here are rooted in the everyday, the speculative offerings are equally satisfying. Rasputins Remarkable Sleight of Hand [56] features a carnival magician who knows, in the age of cell phones and selfies, that he needs to up the razzle-dazzle [59] in his act, and attempts it in a way few readers will anticipate. In Black Shuck, [44] a man who tends to and then gives away a stray dog becomes obsessed with the idea that misfortune will befall him if he cant get it back. And in the hallucinatory title story, inner demons are substituted with actual ones, as an older couple is forced to contend with monsters. A memorable debut: each of these stories is as original and multidimensional as the characters who inhabit them. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. viii |
| Burning Slag | p. 1 |
| Robbing Pillars | p. 7 |
| The Immortal Jesse James | p. 13 |
| Barry Gibb Is the Cutest Bee Gee | p. 25 |
| Black Shuck | p. 44 |
| Rasputin's Remarkable Sleight of Hand | p. 56 |
| Run, Little Girl | p. 67 |
| Clinch | p. 77 |
| Little Miss Bobcat | p. 92 |
| Merope | p. 106 |
| Crazy Checks | p. 114 |
| Nympho | p. 126 |
| This Low Land of Sorrow | p. 141 |
| Justice Boys | p. 144 |
| Monsters in Appalachia | p. 156 |
| Reading and Discussion Questions | p. 167 |
| About the Author | p. 169 |
