“Hermits Die on Thursday” is Gregory Ariail’s second volume of fantasy fiction, speculative and imaginative. The first was “The Gospel of Rot,” in which a woman, Amelia, after 50 years as a recluse, ventures out into the world, mainly Appalachia, and has adventures, including finding a neighbor who has turned into an apple tree.
This new volume, winner of a Foreword Indies silver medal in fantasy, is divided into two sections; the first is “Appalachian Apocrypha.” The title story is six short obituaries of recently deceased hermits. The first, Hoyle Thompson, 89, choked to death eating his own beard which was the longest ever recorded in North Carolina, 25.8 feet long. The Cherokee hermit, James Cuttowa, is found hovering upside down in his cabin. A female hermit, Imogene Bascom, lived for 49 years in a hollow American Chestnut tree.
In the story “Transubstantiation,” a farmer, snowbound for many days, is starving. He has four hens to kill and eat but discovers that the head of each chicken has turned into the head of the crucified Jesus. At first, he eats the carcasses but not the heads, then like the geek at a carnival, he devours the heads, and “passes” them, whole, complete with crowns of thorns.
In another story, “Eldgrim,” from the second half of the collection, set in an imaginary northern European Middle Ages, a Viking priest apprentice goes on a quest to find his missing mentor, a powerful priest. Only he, Eldgrim, can tell our hero the magic words that will make him a full priest, with extraordinary powers.
On this quest, he meets many dangers of course, most notably the Witch of Krakaness Forest. This terrifying creature, covered in black hair, commands him to reach through her veil of hair and pluck out her eyeball. She commands: “Now swallow it whole. No chewing.” He does, and then experiences a vision with clues on where to find his mentor.
When the vision ends, he passes the witch’s eye, and continues on his quest, through blizzards and rivers of swords, and learns an important and painful lesson about the gods: it is wrong to pick only one and worship him or her. It is better to worship them all, he says, then “Each god would offer me a pittance of favor, yet a pittance from every god would amass great spiritual wealth.” When he finds his master, Eldgrim says: “All of my body has been transported to Valhalla except my mouth.” Eldgrim instructs the narrator to reach into his mouth, where he seizes a handful of “beautiful words.”
My own tastes in fiction run more to psychological realism but, undeniably, fantasy is a growing, popular field, and Ariail has tied the genre to the Appalachian region. He is about to publish a nonfiction study, “Gnomes: A Strange History.”
