Wiley Cash is a native North Carolinian who made an impressive debut in 2012 with “A Land More Kind than Home,” set in Appalachia, in Madison County. This novel, it can be said without fear of dispute, is Southern neo-gothic, as if written by a child of Erskine Caldwell and Flannery O’Connor.
The traditional ingredients are all there. We learn that young Jess Hall, a healthy, energetic lad, has an older brother, Christopher, called Stump, who is mute. Stump did not cry at birth and has never spoken. Of course, his parents are distraught. Physicians have been consulted, to no avail.
Now Stump’s mama has fallen under the spell of a charismatic preacher, Carson Chambliss, a charlatan, who has led mama astray and offered false hope for Stump. The windows of this church “With Signs Following,” a storefront, are covered in newspaper. No one can see in, but they can hear the loud music, guitars and drums, the chanting, and the glossolalia.
They cannot see the boxes of snakes Chambliss is using in his services. The inspiration for this creature, Chambliss, is surely the same as for Dennis Covington’s wonderful study of snake-handling churches “Salvation on Sand Mountain.”
Cash’s novel begins with snakes but there is much more. We learn of preacher Chambliss’s power over his believers, his selfishness and his flagrant hypocrisy and amoral cruelties. The story is told by the local midwife, young Jess himself and the sheriff, Clem Barefield, a good man working to overcome local ignorance, poverty and superstition to get justice.
Since his debut Cash has published three more novels, the most recent “When Ghosts Come Home,” which is still Southern, but less grotesque. Set in North Carolina but this time on the coast and on a small barrier island near Wilmington, “Ghosts“ has a more contemporary feel.
There is again a sheriff, Winston Barnes, who is awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of a plane crashing. He gets out of bed to investigate and finds at the little local airport, a DC-3 cargo plane, damaged, but now suspiciously empty.
The plane probably held drugs, in quantity, and perhaps was on its way from Florida or the Caribbean to somewhere further north. And lying nearby is the body of a local young Black man, Rodney Bellamy. The local bigots immediately declare Bellamy to be a drug dealer, but it won’t stick. He is a virtuous, reliable fellow.
Sheriff Barnes is good man, but not all the law enforcement officers are, and in this story, set in 1984, Cash shows the KKK to be still active and violent, only now with a modern twist: greedy housing developers wanting the Black neighborhood across the tracks.
A fine storyteller, a productive novelist with a sense of his literary ancestors and the contemporary scene, Wiley Cash is a Southern novelist to watch.
