Two New Reviews
Running behind on sharing good news.The Los Angeles ReviewandPublishers Weeklyboth recently weighed in onMonsters in Appalachia. Ryan Boyd at TLAR had this to say, in part:
"Monks’ attention to immediate consciousness is granular and gripping. In the first story, a badly traumatized woman who killed her abusive husband stares into a void of burning coal slag and pines for her children. She is drawn obsessively to the toxic landscape, a mirror of her own life: “It was the kerosene burns on the babies what found her negligent, sores where they’d crawled through raw fuel that one of the older ones had sloshed when filling the heater. Most people said she’d lost her sense from being beaten so often in the head, but they showed no pity on her. Now here she was, wandering the hillsides like a revenant.” The next narrative takes place in another coal hell—an unstable mine. “Already, they have cut a strip in both directions,” sweats the narrator, “and soon they’ll be coming back through the middle, robbing pillars it’s called,” his mind churning up the ironically poetic idiom.There are actual monsters in these pages, too. Monks saves them for last, the magic-realist title story. Melding the horrible and the comic, it depicts a countryside overrun by strange creatures, and involves, for instance, a hideous, bat-like fallen angel sharing a dinner with the elderly couple who own and employ him as a tout for their roadside freakshow, which is composed of other captive demons, some of whom they eat. Mountain tradition gets conscripted into the service of beast hunting: “Anse’s Plotts are of an olden breed, the keenest ever was. They can scent things never heard tell of. Trees? Why that must be simple, she guesses. She herself can scent trees, pine rosin and fruiting pawdads, thought not at a full tear through the dark.” The old mountain woman and her man, stock Appalachian characters, enter apocalyptic modernity, and the story closes with a Biblical vision of the world’s end.Appalachia is a place of frustrated longing. This informs the traditions of its fundamentalist Christianity, which craves a purified world. It fuels the outlaw moonshine culture that has given way to a plague of pills and heroin—a stillborn yearning for chemical escape. It shows up in cross-connected economic, geographical, and affective terms: the drive to get out, to find jobs that don’t involve coal or logging or Medicaid. I heeded that longing, heading to college after high school. Now I live in Los Angeles, where most of my neighbors know as much about Appalachia as I do about Oaxaca. Then again, after sixteen years I don’t know all that much about Appalachia either.Monsters in Appalachia made me want to go back, at least for a visit. To write about Appalachia is to write about America, as Poe realized, even if that is also where monsters are, and Sheryl Monks reports from this countryside as only a novelist can."Here's thePublishers Weeklystarred 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.)"
"Monks’ attention to immediate consciousness is granular and gripping. In the first story, a badly traumatized woman who killed her abusive husband stares into a void of burning coal slag and pines for her children. She is drawn obsessively to the toxic landscape, a mirror of her own life: “It was the kerosene burns on the babies what found her negligent, sores where they’d crawled through raw fuel that one of the older ones had sloshed when filling the heater. Most people said she’d lost her sense from being beaten so often in the head, but they showed no pity on her. Now here she was, wandering the hillsides like a revenant.” The next narrative takes place in another coal hell—an unstable mine. “Already, they have cut a strip in both directions,” sweats the narrator, “and soon they’ll be coming back through the middle, robbing pillars it’s called,” his mind churning up the ironically poetic idiom.There are actual monsters in these pages, too. Monks saves them for last, the magic-realist title story. Melding the horrible and the comic, it depicts a countryside overrun by strange creatures, and involves, for instance, a hideous, bat-like fallen angel sharing a dinner with the elderly couple who own and employ him as a tout for their roadside freakshow, which is composed of other captive demons, some of whom they eat. Mountain tradition gets conscripted into the service of beast hunting: “Anse’s Plotts are of an olden breed, the keenest ever was. They can scent things never heard tell of. Trees? Why that must be simple, she guesses. She herself can scent trees, pine rosin and fruiting pawdads, thought not at a full tear through the dark.” The old mountain woman and her man, stock Appalachian characters, enter apocalyptic modernity, and the story closes with a Biblical vision of the world’s end.Appalachia is a place of frustrated longing. This informs the traditions of its fundamentalist Christianity, which craves a purified world. It fuels the outlaw moonshine culture that has given way to a plague of pills and heroin—a stillborn yearning for chemical escape. It shows up in cross-connected economic, geographical, and affective terms: the drive to get out, to find jobs that don’t involve coal or logging or Medicaid. I heeded that longing, heading to college after high school. Now I live in Los Angeles, where most of my neighbors know as much about Appalachia as I do about Oaxaca. Then again, after sixteen years I don’t know all that much about Appalachia either.Monsters in Appalachia made me want to go back, at least for a visit. To write about Appalachia is to write about America, as Poe realized, even if that is also where monsters are, and Sheryl Monks reports from this countryside as only a novelist can."Here's thePublishers Weeklystarred 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.)"
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