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Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky
The boys howled. In their pockets, eye droppers of gin. They skipped to their car with eyes wide open and sped into the night, down gray county roads, grieving over nothing they could name, beating the dashboard with their fists. Near dawn they broke into a cemetery and pissed on the first angel they could find.
Leah's little brother, Jacob, disappeared when the pair were younger, a tragedy that haunts her still. When a grown man arrives at the non-profit Leah directs claiming to be Jacob, she is wrenched back to her childhood, an iridescent tableau of family joy and strife, swimming at the lake, sneaking candy, late-night fears, and the stories told to quell them.
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is a wrecking-ball of a novel that attempts to give meaning and poetry to everything that comprises small-town life in central Kentucky. Listen: they are the ghost stories that children tell one another, the litter that skirts the gulley, the lines at department stores.
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky reads as though Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson wrote a more focused Antwerp and based it in central Kentucky. A gorgeous, haunting, prismatic jewel of a book.
David Connerley Nahm was born and raised in a small town in central Kentucky. Currently, he lives in the mountains of Virginia where he practices law and teaches law and literature at James Madison University. His short stories have appeared in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Trunk Stories, Eyeshot, and on McSweeney's Internet Tendency.
Leah's little brother, Jacob, disappeared when the pair were younger, a tragedy that haunts her still. When a grown man arrives at the non-profit Leah directs claiming to be Jacob, she is wrenched back to her childhood, an iridescent tableau of family joy and strife, swimming at the lake, sneaking candy, late-night fears, and the stories told to quell them.
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is a wrecking-ball of a novel that attempts to give meaning and poetry to everything that comprises small-town life in central Kentucky. Listen: they are the ghost stories that children tell one another, the litter that skirts the gulley, the lines at department stores.
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky reads as though Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson wrote a more focused Antwerp and based it in central Kentucky. A gorgeous, haunting, prismatic jewel of a book.
David Connerley Nahm was born and raised in a small town in central Kentucky. Currently, he lives in the mountains of Virginia where he practices law and teaches law and literature at James Madison University. His short stories have appeared in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Trunk Stories, Eyeshot, and on McSweeney's Internet Tendency.
222 pages, Paperback
First published August 4, 2014
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1253 people want to read
About the author
David Connerley Nahm
2 books42 followersOriginally from Kentucky, David Connerley Nahm currently lives in Virginia. "Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky" (Two Dollar Radio, August 2014) is his first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 91 reviews
November 5, 2019
this is a lyrical and nonlinear little punch of a book which concerns itself with the life and memories of a woman named leah who runs a nonprofit for low-income women who are victims of domestic abuse. leah's younger brother jacob went missing when he was only five years old, and the mystery of his disappearance has haunted her for her entire life, until the day a man claiming to be jacob appears in her office. what happens next for leah is interspersed with the stories of the women who come to her for help at the nonprofit, overheard conversations, her mother's stories and parenting fears, snippets of playground conversations,memories of leering boys and failed relationships, ghost stories, the dark half-understood tales of sex and death snapped like gum in the half light of evening. and it goes a little something like this:
Without the bonds of school, they pour out of doors, unable to be constrained. The classroom is a coffin and the bedroom is a coffin and even their own bodies are coffins and they must escape. They climb fences and cross cow pastures in cawing gaggles, boys and girls panting, and in strings they follow the stream's muddy edges and climb embankments, passing green glass bottles half-entombed in dried mud, old newspapers with ruined words that may have once described some terrible tragedy, ripped clothes left to the rain in the tangle of a tree's old roots, and abandoned cars with trees growing through them. They follow thin tributaries off into dark bowers of bent branches and debris left by last summer's young. Boys look at the bare legs of girls who look at the bare legs of girls who look at the bare legs of boys who look at the bare legs of boys and so forth in the warm shade of dark green leaves. A shoe and a pair of underpants caught on a rock in the water as the current improvises eddies.
this reads like a more poetic megan abbott - it's about all those slices of childhood and adolescence which are carved in the space away from adults. all the secrets and selftimes girls spend teetering on the edge of the adult world, with the allure of older boys - their throats full of laughter like a skull full of honey.
he's great writing about childhood cruelty and regret - the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of sexual opportunity.
By the gate to get onto the ride, boys in pegged jeans and sleeveless t-shirts spat onto the straw covered ground. "Wanna come with us?" one asked as the others stalked and hunched in the glitter of the ride's light, but Leah declined, unnerved by the boys' open stares, by the boys' glistening foreheads and erupting cheeks. She searched the dark for some sign of their father, but he'd wandered off. Jacob was dazzled by the figures capering in the din and squeezed his big sister's hand.
The boys howled. In their pockets, eye droppers of gin. They skipped to their car with eyes wide open and sped into the night, down gray country roads, grieving over nothing they could name, beating the dashboard with their fists. Near dawn they broke into a cemetery and pissed on the first angel they could find.
and the carelessness of casual youthful bullying:
They weren't bad children, were they? They just wanted to carve their names into something while they were still sharp.
structurally, this is more of a tone-piece than a straightforward narrative. it's one of those Finnegans Wake riverrun deals where the action on the last page is the action of the first (post-prologue) page, and the part a few chapters in takes place after the last page and so on and so on. we will be given a scene only to return to it some chapters on, from a different perspective, with the revealing details unpacking the emotional truth of the scene. the novel's ambiguous ending appears in the middle of the book, when you don't yet know what you are looking at. or for. it definitely is a book that requires a second read - my second time through helped me place the scenes in a more understandable timeline.
it also does that wonderful thing that the beginning of The Goldfinch does - where you know what happens, but not when. or how. so you are just there, reading, waiting for the other shoe to drop, tensing with each new scene - bracing yourself for the "is it here? is this going to be where?? or this…?"
character development is sacrificed for mood, for scratching away at memory - to those familiar primal half-remembered scents and shame blushes of adolescence. and there is some truly lovely writing here.
All children want to go to space. Earth only offers parents wailing about overdraft notices and evening news playing in an empty den. Dead pets too. Childhood is a rot. And so they look up and see stars shiver, ancient information only just now arriving, because that is the only place left to look, and they yearn.
this isn't a book that's looking to please everyone. people who value immediacy of plot over delicacy of language will be very frustrated. and there's some validity those who question whether nonlinear narratives are just gimmicky exercises whose story would not be half as interesting were it written out in the proper sequence. because i don't think this one would be. but i personally find the temporal fluidity kind of charming - i like that it is disjoined and that it hides its important scenes. occasionally it rambles - there is one particular 10-page passage that i thought was a little self-indulgent and caused imagery overload in my brain, but overall i really liked the writing, and considering it's a debut, i am as impressed as can be.
you know your tastes - you know if this one is for you. all i know is that i thought it was graceful and accomplished.
come to my blog!
Without the bonds of school, they pour out of doors, unable to be constrained. The classroom is a coffin and the bedroom is a coffin and even their own bodies are coffins and they must escape. They climb fences and cross cow pastures in cawing gaggles, boys and girls panting, and in strings they follow the stream's muddy edges and climb embankments, passing green glass bottles half-entombed in dried mud, old newspapers with ruined words that may have once described some terrible tragedy, ripped clothes left to the rain in the tangle of a tree's old roots, and abandoned cars with trees growing through them. They follow thin tributaries off into dark bowers of bent branches and debris left by last summer's young. Boys look at the bare legs of girls who look at the bare legs of girls who look at the bare legs of boys who look at the bare legs of boys and so forth in the warm shade of dark green leaves. A shoe and a pair of underpants caught on a rock in the water as the current improvises eddies.
this reads like a more poetic megan abbott - it's about all those slices of childhood and adolescence which are carved in the space away from adults. all the secrets and selftimes girls spend teetering on the edge of the adult world, with the allure of older boys - their throats full of laughter like a skull full of honey.
he's great writing about childhood cruelty and regret - the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of sexual opportunity.
By the gate to get onto the ride, boys in pegged jeans and sleeveless t-shirts spat onto the straw covered ground. "Wanna come with us?" one asked as the others stalked and hunched in the glitter of the ride's light, but Leah declined, unnerved by the boys' open stares, by the boys' glistening foreheads and erupting cheeks. She searched the dark for some sign of their father, but he'd wandered off. Jacob was dazzled by the figures capering in the din and squeezed his big sister's hand.
The boys howled. In their pockets, eye droppers of gin. They skipped to their car with eyes wide open and sped into the night, down gray country roads, grieving over nothing they could name, beating the dashboard with their fists. Near dawn they broke into a cemetery and pissed on the first angel they could find.
and the carelessness of casual youthful bullying:
They weren't bad children, were they? They just wanted to carve their names into something while they were still sharp.
structurally, this is more of a tone-piece than a straightforward narrative. it's one of those Finnegans Wake riverrun deals where the action on the last page is the action of the first (post-prologue) page, and the part a few chapters in takes place after the last page and so on and so on. we will be given a scene only to return to it some chapters on, from a different perspective, with the revealing details unpacking the emotional truth of the scene. the novel's ambiguous ending appears in the middle of the book, when you don't yet know what you are looking at. or for. it definitely is a book that requires a second read - my second time through helped me place the scenes in a more understandable timeline.
it also does that wonderful thing that the beginning of The Goldfinch does - where you know what happens, but not when. or how. so you are just there, reading, waiting for the other shoe to drop, tensing with each new scene - bracing yourself for the "is it here? is this going to be where?? or this…?"
character development is sacrificed for mood, for scratching away at memory - to those familiar primal half-remembered scents and shame blushes of adolescence. and there is some truly lovely writing here.
All children want to go to space. Earth only offers parents wailing about overdraft notices and evening news playing in an empty den. Dead pets too. Childhood is a rot. And so they look up and see stars shiver, ancient information only just now arriving, because that is the only place left to look, and they yearn.
this isn't a book that's looking to please everyone. people who value immediacy of plot over delicacy of language will be very frustrated. and there's some validity those who question whether nonlinear narratives are just gimmicky exercises whose story would not be half as interesting were it written out in the proper sequence. because i don't think this one would be. but i personally find the temporal fluidity kind of charming - i like that it is disjoined and that it hides its important scenes. occasionally it rambles - there is one particular 10-page passage that i thought was a little self-indulgent and caused imagery overload in my brain, but overall i really liked the writing, and considering it's a debut, i am as impressed as can be.
you know your tastes - you know if this one is for you. all i know is that i thought it was graceful and accomplished.
come to my blog!
January 27, 2025
As I was reminded of with the recent heavy(ish) snowfall in New Orleans, an unusual event defamiliarizes a place you’ve known all your life. In this atmospheric novel, the rural Kentucky community Leah Shepherd has known all her life is defamiliarized (permanently for her) by the disappearance of her brother Jacob when they are young children.
This defamiliarization—the homing in on and the honing of particulars—is conveyed through the gorgeous prose, which carries the reader, nonlinearly, from the siblings’ childhood to Leah’s life as an adult, alone with her daily unspoken guilt, her parents nearby, never forgetting the event (the morning of and the night before are constants for Leah) that altered and shaped their lives.
Leah and her family can’t move on, but the community does. After Jacob is turned into a ghost by schoolkids, there’s an amazing set-piece of Leah, imbued with dread, running an errand for a teacher to a mostly unused floor with its “haunted” bathroom. All elementary schools seem to have such stories attached to them; kids love to scare each other and themselves with creepy stories, as Leah did to the younger Jacob.
The simple joys and fears of childhood (before Jacob’s disappearance), the illogical terror of children awake in their beds, are captured beautifully. Revisiting her memories, Leah wonders if those fears were a warning she failed to heed. The careful reader, privy to some of her parents’ activities, can make certain assumptions, but nothing much is resolved. In fact, if you need resolution, this isn’t for you. If you need things to “happen” (though, of course, things do happen), this isn’t for you.
At times, I was reminded of how I felt when I first discovered Jon McGregor with his If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things. His Reservoir 13 came to mind occasionally while I was reading, too, as well as his title So Many Ways to Begin. Nahm’s novel, however, is not derivative and is unique in my experience. I can’t overstate how impressed I am with it.
And I’m not giving anything away by saying that the novel ends (and begins, though I’d forgotten that) with a disorienting snowstorm.
This defamiliarization—the homing in on and the honing of particulars—is conveyed through the gorgeous prose, which carries the reader, nonlinearly, from the siblings’ childhood to Leah’s life as an adult, alone with her daily unspoken guilt, her parents nearby, never forgetting the event (the morning of and the night before are constants for Leah) that altered and shaped their lives.
Leah and her family can’t move on, but the community does. After Jacob is turned into a ghost by schoolkids, there’s an amazing set-piece of Leah, imbued with dread, running an errand for a teacher to a mostly unused floor with its “haunted” bathroom. All elementary schools seem to have such stories attached to them; kids love to scare each other and themselves with creepy stories, as Leah did to the younger Jacob.
The simple joys and fears of childhood (before Jacob’s disappearance), the illogical terror of children awake in their beds, are captured beautifully. Revisiting her memories, Leah wonders if those fears were a warning she failed to heed. The careful reader, privy to some of her parents’ activities, can make certain assumptions, but nothing much is resolved. In fact, if you need resolution, this isn’t for you. If you need things to “happen” (though, of course, things do happen), this isn’t for you.
At times, I was reminded of how I felt when I first discovered Jon McGregor with his If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things. His Reservoir 13 came to mind occasionally while I was reading, too, as well as his title So Many Ways to Begin. Nahm’s novel, however, is not derivative and is unique in my experience. I can’t overstate how impressed I am with it.
And I’m not giving anything away by saying that the novel ends (and begins, though I’d forgotten that) with a disorienting snowstorm.
May 2, 2025
Young gods die young. The palace beyond this world rotting even as it is born. Young die young. Accumulate, fade, emptiness and an evening of rain with no thunder. Just static.
Every now and again you read a book that's so mesmerising it makes you dizzy. Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is one of those books. The last time I felt like this is when I read The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish. Both published by Two Dollar Radio, take note.
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is about loss and loneliness. It's superbly written.
It’s a book with shades of colour and shades of grey. Leah Shepard is haunted by both the past and the present, and it's the disappearance of her brother as a young boy that is central to the story. The non linear storytelling is deftly handled. The prose is just brilliant, one fantastic sentence leads to an even better sentence. Repeat for nearly 200 pages.
The command of language, the rhythm and the pacing are just perfect. It's a haunting and beautiful read.
As stars cooled and dust became the Earth and as the Earth cracked and became towns and as this town divided and divided again and became his house and his neighborhood, the entire history of life deeper than living is written in him.
I have to thank my friend Teresa Tumminello Brader for alerting me to this novel. Please read her fabulous review of it. Teresa never gives a bum steer. Take note.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Every now and again you read a book that's so mesmerising it makes you dizzy. Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is one of those books. The last time I felt like this is when I read The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish. Both published by Two Dollar Radio, take note.
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is about loss and loneliness. It's superbly written.
It’s a book with shades of colour and shades of grey. Leah Shepard is haunted by both the past and the present, and it's the disappearance of her brother as a young boy that is central to the story. The non linear storytelling is deftly handled. The prose is just brilliant, one fantastic sentence leads to an even better sentence. Repeat for nearly 200 pages.
The command of language, the rhythm and the pacing are just perfect. It's a haunting and beautiful read.
As stars cooled and dust became the Earth and as the Earth cracked and became towns and as this town divided and divided again and became his house and his neighborhood, the entire history of life deeper than living is written in him.
I have to thank my friend Teresa Tumminello Brader for alerting me to this novel. Please read her fabulous review of it. Teresa never gives a bum steer. Take note.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
November 1, 2020
Deeply surprised that this is a first novel.
It's true that Author Nahm isn't a tyro, having been published in many prestigious venues (eg, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet) prior to this novel appearing from the midwestern fastness harboring Two Dollar Radio (to whom I offer my thanks for sending me this book), a genuinely exciting press, in 2014.
I'm not sure that the plot will make any difference to you in deciding whether or not to read it. The point of the journey through a smallish Anytown, its civic and familial rituals and failures, is all in the way Author Nahm speaks to us.
The focus Author Nahm brings to the light, the surfaces, the ways in and out of every space and every thought of the characters is, for me, the appeal of the book. I love to see the spaces a story takes place within. I am always happy to see evocative, even emotive, language used in conveying a sense of the look, the visual impact, of a space, a person, a point of view. This book is replete with these moments and observations that he has imbued with the emotional resonance to enrich his characters' actions and reactions.
It isn't often that the physical object "book" merits discussion in my review. This object, with its deckled-edge pages that are evocative of an older time when books were delivered without bindings and with uncut signatures direct from the printer, is perfectly in tune with my sense of its story. The novel inside the book benefits from this expensive grace note. The cover, with its french flaps and its matte, uncoated stock, reinforces the days-of-yore feeling that a paperback usually struggles to convey. The beautiful halftone reproductions of ancient fossils from an 1889 monograph on the geology of Kentucky are the lift the book needed to take it into next-level aesthetic harmony between its physical and metaphysical selves.
I saw a Goodreader's addition of the book to his TBR and, oddly enough, that came after my suggestion of this novel to my Young Gentleman Caller in our Sunday-morning Zoom. (He had forgotten about the time change so it was a bit earlier than I was expecting *grumble* so he was vamping until I could open my eyes all the way by asking me what he should read next...my eye lit on this spine in my bookcrate...and we were away.) It's another one of what he amusingly, if accurately, calls my "hardware jobs"...books I've BookDarted so thoroughly that they clank. He's going to be out here soon so I'll hand it over then, but y'all need to get you one! There's a paperback-ebook bundle for only $14! Cheap at twice the price. Honest!
Summer comes to Kentucky as a shock, as though it was impossible for the land to ever be green and full again. Magnolias with swollen white petals sway in warm breezes, record-high humid air fills lungs like warm water and the invisible mechanism that animates everything slows as summer's heavy thumb rests on its ancient belts.
It's true that Author Nahm isn't a tyro, having been published in many prestigious venues (eg, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet) prior to this novel appearing from the midwestern fastness harboring Two Dollar Radio (to whom I offer my thanks for sending me this book), a genuinely exciting press, in 2014.
I'm not sure that the plot will make any difference to you in deciding whether or not to read it. The point of the journey through a smallish Anytown, its civic and familial rituals and failures, is all in the way Author Nahm speaks to us.
The morning was warm. Each drop of light suspended in the air. Against the bricks, the ceiling was a universe of sun-bleached geometric forms and figures waiting for young imaginations to see them.
–and–
Crow Station, Kentucky: a girl at the window watching a shift in the shadows, listening to the sound of the night, the glittering dark above her bed, her father's hands having placed the sky there, cracked plaster rivers among constellations of dead boys and girls, but by morning the vault of the heavens is nothing but white ceiling, though the corners do flutter with dusty webs her parents have not noticed and her brother's bed.
–and–
The television makes only one sound, the soft hum of light.
The focus Author Nahm brings to the light, the surfaces, the ways in and out of every space and every thought of the characters is, for me, the appeal of the book. I love to see the spaces a story takes place within. I am always happy to see evocative, even emotive, language used in conveying a sense of the look, the visual impact, of a space, a person, a point of view. This book is replete with these moments and observations that he has imbued with the emotional resonance to enrich his characters' actions and reactions.
It isn't often that the physical object "book" merits discussion in my review. This object, with its deckled-edge pages that are evocative of an older time when books were delivered without bindings and with uncut signatures direct from the printer, is perfectly in tune with my sense of its story. The novel inside the book benefits from this expensive grace note. The cover, with its french flaps and its matte, uncoated stock, reinforces the days-of-yore feeling that a paperback usually struggles to convey. The beautiful halftone reproductions of ancient fossils from an 1889 monograph on the geology of Kentucky are the lift the book needed to take it into next-level aesthetic harmony between its physical and metaphysical selves.
I saw a Goodreader's addition of the book to his TBR and, oddly enough, that came after my suggestion of this novel to my Young Gentleman Caller in our Sunday-morning Zoom. (He had forgotten about the time change so it was a bit earlier than I was expecting *grumble* so he was vamping until I could open my eyes all the way by asking me what he should read next...my eye lit on this spine in my bookcrate...and we were away.) It's another one of what he amusingly, if accurately, calls my "hardware jobs"...books I've BookDarted so thoroughly that they clank. He's going to be out here soon so I'll hand it over then, but y'all need to get you one! There's a paperback-ebook bundle for only $14! Cheap at twice the price. Honest!
October 9, 2014
3.5 I first had a problem getting into the language and format of this novel. It is non-linear, stream of consciousness novel that skips back and forth, often on the same page. Yet, the prose and the observations were beautiful at time, tedious a others. It is more a story of memory, memories from before Leah's brother went missing and memories of her family after.
This alternates with her current job as head of a foundation that provides aid for women and children who cannot help themselves for a variety of reasons. What happened to her brother though has left her with a lack of compassion which makes her chosen field a strange one. All these then are interspersed throughout the novel and the reader does get a thorough look at Leah and her life, then and now.
The stream of consciousness alternates with straight out story telling and it serves to prove by the many glimpses of conversations and observations that because life has stopped at a certain time period for some, life continues on for others.
At times beautiful and haunting but alternately the descriptive writing almost became too much and I found myself skimming. So this is recommended for those who can relate to a different type of story, albeit one with some beautiful writing.
This alternates with her current job as head of a foundation that provides aid for women and children who cannot help themselves for a variety of reasons. What happened to her brother though has left her with a lack of compassion which makes her chosen field a strange one. All these then are interspersed throughout the novel and the reader does get a thorough look at Leah and her life, then and now.
The stream of consciousness alternates with straight out story telling and it serves to prove by the many glimpses of conversations and observations that because life has stopped at a certain time period for some, life continues on for others.
At times beautiful and haunting but alternately the descriptive writing almost became too much and I found myself skimming. So this is recommended for those who can relate to a different type of story, albeit one with some beautiful writing.
February 4, 2014
http://wordnerdy.blogspot.com/2014/02...
OK, so, full disclosure: David is a friend of mine, and is honestly one of my favorite people, so even though he asked me to be objective, this is still basically a rave review (I'm not the only one who likes it! It was included in Library Journal's galley guide for ALA Midwinter, so I hope all my librarian friends grabbed a copy). The protagonist is Leah, who runs a nonprofit aimed at helping low-income women and children, and who is haunted by the disappearance of her younger brother years before. It's really the narrative voice that's center stage here--telling not just Leah's story (jumping back and forth in time), but that of the women she works with, the kids she grew up with, her family, and honestly, that of the whole town. I think the best word to describe the writing here is EVOCATIVE. David (sorry, I really can't do the professional "author-last-name" reference for someone I know) really nails the atmosphere here. It's very atmospheric! (The interstitial illustrations of seashells or like those magnified pictures of grains of sand or fossils or whatever they are really add to this, and help highlight the unique nature of the story.) I thought this was VERY well-done. And I think I'm being objective when I say that. A/A-.
OK, so, full disclosure: David is a friend of mine, and is honestly one of my favorite people, so even though he asked me to be objective, this is still basically a rave review (I'm not the only one who likes it! It was included in Library Journal's galley guide for ALA Midwinter, so I hope all my librarian friends grabbed a copy). The protagonist is Leah, who runs a nonprofit aimed at helping low-income women and children, and who is haunted by the disappearance of her younger brother years before. It's really the narrative voice that's center stage here--telling not just Leah's story (jumping back and forth in time), but that of the women she works with, the kids she grew up with, her family, and honestly, that of the whole town. I think the best word to describe the writing here is EVOCATIVE. David (sorry, I really can't do the professional "author-last-name" reference for someone I know) really nails the atmosphere here. It's very atmospheric! (The interstitial illustrations of seashells or like those magnified pictures of grains of sand or fossils or whatever they are really add to this, and help highlight the unique nature of the story.) I thought this was VERY well-done. And I think I'm being objective when I say that. A/A-.
December 8, 2014
Some very beautiful prose here, but it felt like a short story crammed full of slam poetry like writings. I would read another novel by Nahm, but this was a very rough first novel to get through.
August 22, 2014
you know kentucky is haunted right? no tribes actually lived there, oh sure there was hunting and gathering, and i guess the old one lived in caves waaaay back when, but who would live in a haunted land? oklahoma area too was like that, not because it was haunted, but because it is hell.
but back to kentucky, there were many proscriptions about going there, living there, getting in the water there, as there were giants made of stone who loved to munch on humans, and unspeakable panthers that lived underground but would surely eat a human if opportunity arose. and lots of other grusome human destroying animals and other creatrues.
so most everybody deserves everything they get in this novel. except for leah, it wasn;t really her fault!
a word to the wise, don;t ever live in kentucky (or oklahoma).
but back to kentucky, there were many proscriptions about going there, living there, getting in the water there, as there were giants made of stone who loved to munch on humans, and unspeakable panthers that lived underground but would surely eat a human if opportunity arose. and lots of other grusome human destroying animals and other creatrues.
so most everybody deserves everything they get in this novel. except for leah, it wasn;t really her fault!
a word to the wise, don;t ever live in kentucky (or oklahoma).
August 15, 2014
It's like entering a dream that you don't want to leave.
September 11, 2014
confusing and hard to follow and equally hard to stay interested in.
October 10, 2017
If you need a cogent storyline to follow, you won't find it here. While the author's elusive tactics add to the mystery, we all require some point of focus to capture our attention. Their are glimmers of shining truths poetically blurted amidst the rubble of his prose, and he captures the dreamlike quality of childhood & memories...but I leave this story wondering way too much.
May 31, 2023
A non-linear collection of memories from Leah Shepherd who grew up in a small Kentucky town and whose brother was abducted at a young age. Beautifully written descriptions bursting with the nostalgia of childhood and the horrors of going through and moving past a tragedy. At times I thought the passages were going nowhere and that there wasn't much story inside of the fragmented memories, however I can say that I was wrong and that I really enjoyed the way the book ended.
tasted
April 25, 2024A fresh and well-written novella, consisting of short third-person-omniscient sections of storytelling, with little dialogue. Just up my alley. It would have appealed to me more if the principal characters and what stands in for plot interested me more.
August 1, 2020
To be upfront, I don't think I can fairly evaluate this book. I'll explain why, but first all praise to the author for his achievement. Basically, this novel hits to close to home in many ways.
It's a story set in rural/smalltown central kentucky and that was my life from age 10 onward. I lived in the countryside outside of Cecilia Ky with the small town of elizabethtown about 10 miles north. This novel is set in crow station, with the smalltown being Danville I presume. So many details of this upbringing are so perfectly aligned with my memories that I looked for information on the author and discovered that not only is he just a few years younger than me, he was at Centre College the same time I was there. He undoubtedly had Professor Rasmussen and was probably encouraged and assisted by the very kind Professor Mark Lucas (he may have even had Prof Mannheim who had to fail me my senior year bc I only came to class 4 times all semester).
The author, like me,went on to become an attorney and I suspect, given the protagonist's job and a particularly insightful passage working with the downtrodden and oppressed everyday feels, did similar public interest work as myself when he began practice. And all of these things I recognize so well (plus how impressed I am that he was able to make a novel out of it) mean I very much enjoyed reading it and found several moments quite touching. But it also seems like many readers will find it a bit pretentious and too try-hard for their tastes. I think that's fair for those people, however, the way certain passages reached into my brain and allowed me access to my own past was incredibly winning regardless of the verisimilitude on the page.
Nice job, David. Congratulations
It's a story set in rural/smalltown central kentucky and that was my life from age 10 onward. I lived in the countryside outside of Cecilia Ky with the small town of elizabethtown about 10 miles north. This novel is set in crow station, with the smalltown being Danville I presume. So many details of this upbringing are so perfectly aligned with my memories that I looked for information on the author and discovered that not only is he just a few years younger than me, he was at Centre College the same time I was there. He undoubtedly had Professor Rasmussen and was probably encouraged and assisted by the very kind Professor Mark Lucas (he may have even had Prof Mannheim who had to fail me my senior year bc I only came to class 4 times all semester).
The author, like me,went on to become an attorney and I suspect, given the protagonist's job and a particularly insightful passage working with the downtrodden and oppressed everyday feels, did similar public interest work as myself when he began practice. And all of these things I recognize so well (plus how impressed I am that he was able to make a novel out of it) mean I very much enjoyed reading it and found several moments quite touching. But it also seems like many readers will find it a bit pretentious and too try-hard for their tastes. I think that's fair for those people, however, the way certain passages reached into my brain and allowed me access to my own past was incredibly winning regardless of the verisimilitude on the page.
Nice job, David. Congratulations
August 16, 2015
This was a heavy, dense, deep book. Unfortunately the climax didn't deliver.
I was disappointed starting about halfway through. Some great writing but despite this,
the plot didn't come through.
I was disappointed starting about halfway through. Some great writing but despite this,
the plot didn't come through.
April 15, 2021
It's rare for me to not like a book from Two Dollar Radio. As intriguing as ANCIENT OCEANS OF CENTRAL KENTUCKY sounded, it did not hold my interest. The prose is beautiful. And yet...there is no plot. Without plot to hold the story together, I never felt eager to pick this novel up to read each evening.
You could read the first 15 and the last 15 pages of this novel and get the full plot. The ending is ambiguous as hell, which I am usually okay with, but I slogged through 170 pages of atmospheric descriptions in the middle for no satisfying conclusion.
You could read the first 15 and the last 15 pages of this novel and get the full plot. The ending is ambiguous as hell, which I am usually okay with, but I slogged through 170 pages of atmospheric descriptions in the middle for no satisfying conclusion.
October 30, 2023
crying crying crying
Read
September 29, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2014/09/01/r...
Review by Alex Houston
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky will challenge you. It will leave you dizzy, wistful, and drained, like you might feel if you mounted one of those long-vanished schoolyard merry-go-rounds and felt again the familiar rush of fear and delight, mixed now with a bittersweet surge of searing nostalgia and the return of a thousand long-forgotten memories. Writing it apparently wasn’t a cakewalk either: Kentucky native David Connerley Nahm spent nearly 15 years hunkered in empty offices and deserted malls typing, jotting, and scrawling a 400,000 word manuscript that he then painstakingly pared down to 55,000 words. What he has finally delivered is a book as dazzling and unsettling as a lone firework suddenly bursting — then just as quickly vanishing — on an otherwise dark, quiet night. Your heart might race, your eyes might hold the flash, your ears might ring, but when it’s all gone, you’ll want it back. So it is with this book, which, as much as anything, is about that destructive, irrational, yet wholly irrepressible desire for the past to somehow return, and, at the same time, the terror we’d feel were that wish to be unexpectedly granted.
Ostensibly, the plot of Ancient Oceans, which nestles itself nicely alongside Winesburg, Ohio and Our Town in the modest but magnificent tradition of small-town chronicles in American literature, involves a woman, Leah, who leads a lonely and thankless life running a non-profit in her hometown of Crow Station, Kentucky, and whose quiet existence is abruptly disrupted when a man shows up claiming to be her brother, Jacob, who disappeared years before and has long been presumed dead. This premise could easily lay the ground for a conventional, half-baked mystery, in which readers are kept in suspense as the details of the disappearance and the true identity of the man claiming to be the lost child are slowly, calculatedly revealed. (And indeed, Nahm does follow this formula to some extent with a kind-of-maybe reveal towards the end; but, by that point, he has built up layers of ambiguity and disorientation to such an extent that certainty and clarity no longer seem possible or even desirable.) In Nahm’s hands the “premise” is not what the book is “about” — rather, he uses the basic set-up of a formulaic thriller to pose and then inventively explore a set of questions: What would happen if the past did return? What if the dead lived again? What if the creatures outlined in the fossils beneath our feet, which form the literal foundations of our towns, came back out of the earth fully formed, disrupting the very bedrock of our existence?
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/09/01/r...
Review by Alex Houston
Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky will challenge you. It will leave you dizzy, wistful, and drained, like you might feel if you mounted one of those long-vanished schoolyard merry-go-rounds and felt again the familiar rush of fear and delight, mixed now with a bittersweet surge of searing nostalgia and the return of a thousand long-forgotten memories. Writing it apparently wasn’t a cakewalk either: Kentucky native David Connerley Nahm spent nearly 15 years hunkered in empty offices and deserted malls typing, jotting, and scrawling a 400,000 word manuscript that he then painstakingly pared down to 55,000 words. What he has finally delivered is a book as dazzling and unsettling as a lone firework suddenly bursting — then just as quickly vanishing — on an otherwise dark, quiet night. Your heart might race, your eyes might hold the flash, your ears might ring, but when it’s all gone, you’ll want it back. So it is with this book, which, as much as anything, is about that destructive, irrational, yet wholly irrepressible desire for the past to somehow return, and, at the same time, the terror we’d feel were that wish to be unexpectedly granted.
Ostensibly, the plot of Ancient Oceans, which nestles itself nicely alongside Winesburg, Ohio and Our Town in the modest but magnificent tradition of small-town chronicles in American literature, involves a woman, Leah, who leads a lonely and thankless life running a non-profit in her hometown of Crow Station, Kentucky, and whose quiet existence is abruptly disrupted when a man shows up claiming to be her brother, Jacob, who disappeared years before and has long been presumed dead. This premise could easily lay the ground for a conventional, half-baked mystery, in which readers are kept in suspense as the details of the disappearance and the true identity of the man claiming to be the lost child are slowly, calculatedly revealed. (And indeed, Nahm does follow this formula to some extent with a kind-of-maybe reveal towards the end; but, by that point, he has built up layers of ambiguity and disorientation to such an extent that certainty and clarity no longer seem possible or even desirable.) In Nahm’s hands the “premise” is not what the book is “about” — rather, he uses the basic set-up of a formulaic thriller to pose and then inventively explore a set of questions: What would happen if the past did return? What if the dead lived again? What if the creatures outlined in the fossils beneath our feet, which form the literal foundations of our towns, came back out of the earth fully formed, disrupting the very bedrock of our existence?
Read the rest here: http://www.full-stop.net/2014/09/01/r...
December 18, 2024
I haven't encountered a novel with this much atmosphere in a long time. A feeling of dread hangs over every page, propelling the reader forward even through the dense fog of words to the ending, which leaves the reader hanging, waiting, and wishing for some sense of closure that never comes.
This is not a typical book, but rather a novel of memories. It takes patience to read; the first hundred pages or so is just a series of reminiscing about the light and shadows of childhood, the loves and cruelties of kids, the way they live tertiary to the adult world until their innocence is ground out by a single event or the slow death of time. Although I've never lived in Kentucky or had a brother, hardly a page went by without me marveling at the way Nahm put into words feelings I've always had, or had but then forgot over the years. Each page is awash with dense imagery that manages to be beautiful in the face of an overhanging cloud that is trying to darken everything.
The plot is simple, regarding a woman whose young brother went missing as a child and the continuing effects this one event has had on the rest of her life. Grief, as illustrated here, is not sobbing, but numbness and disaffection. I'll be pondering this one for a while. An early contender for my favorite read of 2018.
(Reread in 2024)
This is not a typical book, but rather a novel of memories. It takes patience to read; the first hundred pages or so is just a series of reminiscing about the light and shadows of childhood, the loves and cruelties of kids, the way they live tertiary to the adult world until their innocence is ground out by a single event or the slow death of time. Although I've never lived in Kentucky or had a brother, hardly a page went by without me marveling at the way Nahm put into words feelings I've always had, or had but then forgot over the years. Each page is awash with dense imagery that manages to be beautiful in the face of an overhanging cloud that is trying to darken everything.
The plot is simple, regarding a woman whose young brother went missing as a child and the continuing effects this one event has had on the rest of her life. Grief, as illustrated here, is not sobbing, but numbness and disaffection. I'll be pondering this one for a while. An early contender for my favorite read of 2018.
(Reread in 2024)
September 15, 2015
Leah Shepherd runs a shelter for victims of domestic abuse in a small Kentucky town. One day, a man claiming to be her long lost brother appears, and Leah is forced to confront memories she’s long suppressed. Despite having a hook that belongs to a thriller, Ancient Oceans unfurls as languidly as a Southern summer. Like Paul Harding’s Tinkers, it’s a book about time, memory, consciousness, and the interplay between them. Like life itself, there’s no conventional plot here, but rather a series of imperfect memories and vivid impressions. The Kentucky landscape is a major character as well, and Nahm’s meditative descriptions both celebrate and animate his native ground:
"Summer comes to Kentucky as a shock, as though it was impossible for the land to ever be green and full again. Magnolias with swollen white petals sway in warm breezes, record-high humid air fills lungs like warm water and the invisible mechanism that animates everything slows as summer’s heavy thumb rests on its ancient belts."
"Summer comes to Kentucky as a shock, as though it was impossible for the land to ever be green and full again. Magnolias with swollen white petals sway in warm breezes, record-high humid air fills lungs like warm water and the invisible mechanism that animates everything slows as summer’s heavy thumb rests on its ancient belts."
August 12, 2015
Rife with indulgent description, Nahm's Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky is a splintered narrative that is heavy on atmosphere.
It's a cinematic read--and, as a book, plays with light and suggestion like Terrence Malick. Of course that can be both a strength and a curse. I tend towards a more brisk pacing myself, and the dense prose left me to read in short bits and starts--probably not an intended consequence. If you're the kind of reader that loves being fully enmeshed in a world, you'll certainly find lots to like here.
The central character, Leah, fights through her tangled life dealing with some old ghosts from childhood, and while the stylistic choices in terms of storytelling will surely divide the book's readership, the book certainly achieves the choices with an accomplished hand. There's enough intrigue and mystery here to keep the pages turning, and as usual, Two Dollar Radio continues to put out a drop-dead gorgeous books.
It's a cinematic read--and, as a book, plays with light and suggestion like Terrence Malick. Of course that can be both a strength and a curse. I tend towards a more brisk pacing myself, and the dense prose left me to read in short bits and starts--probably not an intended consequence. If you're the kind of reader that loves being fully enmeshed in a world, you'll certainly find lots to like here.
The central character, Leah, fights through her tangled life dealing with some old ghosts from childhood, and while the stylistic choices in terms of storytelling will surely divide the book's readership, the book certainly achieves the choices with an accomplished hand. There's enough intrigue and mystery here to keep the pages turning, and as usual, Two Dollar Radio continues to put out a drop-dead gorgeous books.
April 30, 2025
At only 201 pages, this book was small enough to tuck into my bag and take with me to read in the waiting room of the orthodontist, in my car before work, at the park when the dogs needed a break in the shade. But as small as it was and though I read it feverishly every day, it took me a while to read, as I returned to re-read full pages again or sit with a single paragraph for a while. Memories and dreams and trauma are all cloudy things and to layer these poetically meant -- importantly!, stylistically -- that this was a difficult read; nothing straightforward. To be challenged to find the meaning in the haze offered an experience where I continuously felt unsteady and trepid and yet unbreakably pulled along. A reviewer from the Library Journal called it "impressionistic" and that's perfect. As the image emerges from within the swirls and dots (and howls), the magic of this story and the writing is clearly masterful.
October 14, 2017
This book had so much potential, but it fell way short. Too much stream of consciousness and too little “guide posts” so that the reader would know if they are reading about a flashback, a dream, or what character the passage related to. That said, I could totally identify with the storylines about children telling and honestly believing scary stories their friends tell no matter how unbelievable. It was a super interesting plot line especially considering the main character’s brother disappeared as a child. Too bad it didn’t live up to expectations.
October 21, 2019
This book was on a "books you may have overlooked but must read" shelf in the library, so I fell for it. It brought back memories of reading Absalom, Absalom in advanced English in high school ( not a pleasant memory--shiver). Lovely writing, stream of consciousness, hard to follow, story embedded somewhere in the over abundant text. A true "guilt trip". I would love to read someone else's take on this. What really happened? Do we know?
June 4, 2014
An intriguingly structured slow burn of a novel
April 7, 2025
This experimental novel is Nahm’s debut. It is a unique book whose elegant prose moves between the past and the present in a nonlinear fashion. One critic wrote that Nahm had “no regard for chronological order” and that the past often collided with the present.
I only learned of the book when I read my friend Teresa’s review in January of this year. She hooked me with her beginning paragraph:
And she sealed the deal with her closing paragraph:
******
Despite the fact that Kentucky is now landlocked, it was once covered by seas and even an ocean during different geological times. This is borne out by marine fossils in the regions rock formations. (No, I didn’t know this; I looked it up because the title of the book intrigued me.)
A native of Kentucky, Nahm is a lawyer who now lives in the mountains of Virginia where he practices law and teaches in a college.
And by the way, he said that he worked fifteen years on his novel before it was published in 2014.
I only learned of the book when I read my friend Teresa’s review in January of this year. She hooked me with her beginning paragraph:
As I was reminded of with the recent heavy(ish) snowfall in New Orleans, an unusual event defamiliarizes a place you’ve known all your life. In this atmospheric novel, the rural community Leah Shepherd has known all her life is defamiliarized (permanently for her) by the disappearance of her brother when they are young children.
And she sealed the deal with her closing paragraph:
And I’m not giving anything away by saying that the novel ends (and begins, though I’d forgotten that) with a disorienting snowstorm).
******
Despite the fact that Kentucky is now landlocked, it was once covered by seas and even an ocean during different geological times. This is borne out by marine fossils in the regions rock formations. (No, I didn’t know this; I looked it up because the title of the book intrigued me.)
A native of Kentucky, Nahm is a lawyer who now lives in the mountains of Virginia where he practices law and teaches in a college.
And by the way, he said that he worked fifteen years on his novel before it was published in 2014.
October 11, 2017
A paperback with thick pages, thick paragraphs, sentences short and long, built with words that rush whether or not you know their meaning. This is David Connerley Nahm’s first novel (Two Dollar Radio, 2014). Nahm crashes together the moments of a lifetime with the inevitability of the tide. Disparate moments situate themselves amongst each other, illustrating the necessity of each moment, each choice, in leading to the next.
The story of a little boy’s unsolved disappearance is fractured into a chorus of images both directly related and so peripherally related to the child as to be not related at all. The reader, in search of answers, might find themselves lost in the home of an unnamed child in an unknown year in the small town of Crow Station, Kentucky; looking through the eyes of a new mother and the same mother in her old age on the same page; entertaining a lesson in ancient and future geology. Each glimpse is natural, even as it rushes the mind away from the story you thought you were reading.
Could the end have been stronger? Yes, I suppose it could have. But the nature of a story such as this requires an unsatisfactory ending, as unsatisfactory as a lifetime of searching for a little boy who, even if found, will never be the same little boy who was lost. 4/5
The story of a little boy’s unsolved disappearance is fractured into a chorus of images both directly related and so peripherally related to the child as to be not related at all. The reader, in search of answers, might find themselves lost in the home of an unnamed child in an unknown year in the small town of Crow Station, Kentucky; looking through the eyes of a new mother and the same mother in her old age on the same page; entertaining a lesson in ancient and future geology. Each glimpse is natural, even as it rushes the mind away from the story you thought you were reading.
Could the end have been stronger? Yes, I suppose it could have. But the nature of a story such as this requires an unsatisfactory ending, as unsatisfactory as a lifetime of searching for a little boy who, even if found, will never be the same little boy who was lost. 4/5
December 2, 2024
I sort of think Nahm wanted to make a movie a la Terrence Malick's Tree of Life and settled on this instead. (To be fair, that's my all time favorite movie, so I don't entirely blame him.) In some ways this book reads like an exercise in that exact premise: So much of the writing is devoted to visual descriptions, often as a fleeting montage of images. This was simultaneously compelling and off-putting. If you can appreciate it as a sort of poetry that's just washing over you, it works. But it also completely undermines any sense of momentum within the plot in ways that were frustrating and cumbersome. The best example of this is a chapter that, to my understanding, is simply a mosaic of different people and moments in the town with otherwise no tether to the narrative. This was nearly impossible to read at first, and then became one of my favorite parts of the book once I realized it didn't have to "matter." Notably, what actually does unfold across the plot actually is interesting, a bit eerie, and impactful...which is why all the vivid writing often felt like it was getting in the way of that rather than serving it.
February 18, 2024
ancient oceans of central kentucky is about a women whose brother disappeared when she was a child and the complications that has wrought on her life, told in a nonlinear way that weaves between timelines with the fadiness of memory, which honestly makes the whole thing difficult to get a hold of, difficult to wrestle into a structured story to make sense of. but really there's not that much to make sense of: the plot is thin and the poetry is thick, which is OK and manifests regularly in delillo-esque lists, short declarative statements naming the things around or the contributors to mood. the last quarter suffers (?) that's not the right word, a shift into genrefication / made for TV movie-ness that could have been disastrous but is saved through nonaction and a startling end that I'm still grappling with making sense of.
December 18, 2017
I really liked being in this book. I got distracted at first with the inconsistent tense - present and past mixed in together. Once I accepted that it was intentional, I was able to ride along with it. ["What's past is prologue." Shakespeare, The Tempest. "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun.]
I'm not sure I understand the book completely , except that it made the point for me that when something bad happens when you're young, it can stay with you (and haunt you) for the rest of your life, especially if you think it's your fault.
Thanks, Heidi.
I'm not sure I understand the book completely , except that it made the point for me that when something bad happens when you're young, it can stay with you (and haunt you) for the rest of your life, especially if you think it's your fault.
Thanks, Heidi.
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