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The Same Terrible Storm
THE SAME TERRIBLE STORM introduces us to a fierce and lyrical writer who, in his depiction of contemporary Appalachian life, is equal parts uncompromising and compassionate, and able to eerily channel a wide spectrum of distinctive voices—coal miners, musicians, pill poppers, snake handlers, writers, marijuana farmers, brutal men and complicated women, knowing children and dangerous elders—all of them filled with yearning, all of them inextricably bound to their time and place. An extraordinary debut collection.
“Sheldon Lee Compton is the definition of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short story writer and the poet, saying, “the short story…is the most demanding form after poetry.” A story like “The Son of a Man” in The Same Terrible Storm isn’t so much a story as it is prose poetry. Compton doesn’t write paragraphs, but rather indented stanzas.”
– David Joy, author of Where All Light Tends to Go
“This is a brilliant book by Sheldon Lee Compton, one of our finest short story writers in the independent publishing world.”
– Robert Vaughan, author of Microtones and Rift
“Sheldon Lee Compton is the definition of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short story writer and the poet, saying, “the short story…is the most demanding form after poetry.” A story like “The Son of a Man” in The Same Terrible Storm isn’t so much a story as it is prose poetry. Compton doesn’t write paragraphs, but rather indented stanzas.”
– David Joy, author of Where All Light Tends to Go
“This is a brilliant book by Sheldon Lee Compton, one of our finest short story writers in the independent publishing world.”
– Robert Vaughan, author of Microtones and Rift
195 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 2012
3 people are currently reading
171 people want to read
About the author
Sheldon Lee Compton
29 books105 followersSheldon Lee Compton is a short story writer, novelist, prose poet, and editor from Pike County, Eastern Kentucky.
He is the author of the short story collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012), Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014), Absolute Invention (Secret History Books, 2019) and Sway (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2020).
Compton is also the author of the novels Brown Bottle (Bottom Dog Press, 2016) and Dysphoria (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2019).
His poetry chapbook Podunk Lore was part of the Lantern Lit series (Dog On a Chain Press, 2018) and his first full-length poetry collection, Runaways, was published in 2021 by Alien Buddha Press.
Compton's novel, Alice, was named one of the Best Books of 2023 as selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance.
In 2021 Cowboy Jamboree Press published The Collected Stories of Sheldon Lee Compton and followed that in 2022, on the anniversary of author Breece D'J Pancake's tragic death on April 8, 1979, Compton's memoir The Orchard Is Full of Sound, which the publisher describes as a book that "reflects on his [Compton's] own life, his struggles with poverty and divorce and violence and addiction and fatherhood and an early heart attack and trying to make it as a writer in rural Kentucky, all the while trying to trace the life and tragic ending of one of his literary heroes, Breece D'J Pancake."
In 2012, Compton was a finalist for both the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Still Fiction Award. His writing has been nominated for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, the Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Wigleaf's Top 50. He was cited twice for Best Small Fictions, in 2015 and 2016, before having his short story "Aversion" included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and his short story "The Good Life" included in Best Small Fictions 2022.
Since 2020, he has taught in the Master of Fine Arts program at Concordia University, St. Paul. He also edits the Poverty House Collective and writes the interview series Chaos Questions for Hobart.
He is the author of the short story collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012), Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014), Absolute Invention (Secret History Books, 2019) and Sway (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2020).
Compton is also the author of the novels Brown Bottle (Bottom Dog Press, 2016) and Dysphoria (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2019).
His poetry chapbook Podunk Lore was part of the Lantern Lit series (Dog On a Chain Press, 2018) and his first full-length poetry collection, Runaways, was published in 2021 by Alien Buddha Press.
Compton's novel, Alice, was named one of the Best Books of 2023 as selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance.
In 2021 Cowboy Jamboree Press published The Collected Stories of Sheldon Lee Compton and followed that in 2022, on the anniversary of author Breece D'J Pancake's tragic death on April 8, 1979, Compton's memoir The Orchard Is Full of Sound, which the publisher describes as a book that "reflects on his [Compton's] own life, his struggles with poverty and divorce and violence and addiction and fatherhood and an early heart attack and trying to make it as a writer in rural Kentucky, all the while trying to trace the life and tragic ending of one of his literary heroes, Breece D'J Pancake."
In 2012, Compton was a finalist for both the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Still Fiction Award. His writing has been nominated for the Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, the Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Wigleaf's Top 50. He was cited twice for Best Small Fictions, in 2015 and 2016, before having his short story "Aversion" included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and his short story "The Good Life" included in Best Small Fictions 2022.
Since 2020, he has taught in the Master of Fine Arts program at Concordia University, St. Paul. He also edits the Poverty House Collective and writes the interview series Chaos Questions for Hobart.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 17, 2012
My mother was born in Hatchett Holler in a house barely larger than a shack, now 70 years later dangerously leaning and bereft of paint. I come from the world of tent revivals and singings where simple folk and their homes, nature, God and medication played the leading roles. Actually, I’ve just come back from that same place: from Sheldon Lee Compton’s The Same Terrible Storm.
Told mostly in male first-person or third-person narratives—although there are a few surprises, such as “Place of Birth” told in the second person and “A Tree Born Crooked” told by a female character—Compton’s short story collection is a melodious, somber ballad of place. I’m tempted to call this a rural southern place, and it certainly is. But there’s a deeper place Compton describes in such rich detail. It is the burning place in the characters’ minds that they all seek to soothe. The persistence and medication of pain, witnessed but ignored by nature—and I will venture to include God as disinterested bystander—are at the core of almost all of these stories.
Also at the core of The Same Terrible Storm is a seething, pent-up anger, like the gun in Greg’s pocket from “A Dark River’s Silt,” one of the longer stories in the collection. Greg is a man trying to make things right, to get clean, to find God. Convinced by a dream his girlfriend will leave him for a man of more brawn, he decides he needs a gun. But first he must make a choice between right and wrong. His grandmother’s guitar—the Hummingbird—is hanging on the wall at the pawn shop. Music/family or violence—which will be the antidote that saves him? Of course he buys the gun, which imbues the story with Hitchcockian suspense.
The ending of “A Dark River’s Silt” is explosive, baptismal in a way the reader might not expect. In the same way, the ending of “Intruder” is both devastating and beautiful. Compton’s need to “get the chords just right” has produced a work of finely tuned description. I could quote a hundred passages, but I’ve chosen this one from “Remodeling” because I think it shows Compton’s focus on the home as character. In this passage, the house has retained the residue of anger, as if the room has been ravaged by a storm:
People had certainly lived here. Families. In an area that served as a kitchen there were four chairs that seemed blown about the room. Two tilted against a far wall and the others sat upright but on opposite sides of the room. There were dishes in a cancerous sink.
But there’s hope, and I’ll go ahead and tell you Compton has saved the antidote that will calm the storm until the last story, the last stroke. Redemption and the relief from pain come through family, through a moment shared between father and son. Is this a message? Am I allowed to look for one? And if I’ve found one, does it matter if none was intended? I know one thing: if I were a character in one of these stories, I’d be looking for a sign from God that one day all my efforts would pay off, that I would someday be whole.
Posted originally at Books at Fictionaut
Told mostly in male first-person or third-person narratives—although there are a few surprises, such as “Place of Birth” told in the second person and “A Tree Born Crooked” told by a female character—Compton’s short story collection is a melodious, somber ballad of place. I’m tempted to call this a rural southern place, and it certainly is. But there’s a deeper place Compton describes in such rich detail. It is the burning place in the characters’ minds that they all seek to soothe. The persistence and medication of pain, witnessed but ignored by nature—and I will venture to include God as disinterested bystander—are at the core of almost all of these stories.
Also at the core of The Same Terrible Storm is a seething, pent-up anger, like the gun in Greg’s pocket from “A Dark River’s Silt,” one of the longer stories in the collection. Greg is a man trying to make things right, to get clean, to find God. Convinced by a dream his girlfriend will leave him for a man of more brawn, he decides he needs a gun. But first he must make a choice between right and wrong. His grandmother’s guitar—the Hummingbird—is hanging on the wall at the pawn shop. Music/family or violence—which will be the antidote that saves him? Of course he buys the gun, which imbues the story with Hitchcockian suspense.
The ending of “A Dark River’s Silt” is explosive, baptismal in a way the reader might not expect. In the same way, the ending of “Intruder” is both devastating and beautiful. Compton’s need to “get the chords just right” has produced a work of finely tuned description. I could quote a hundred passages, but I’ve chosen this one from “Remodeling” because I think it shows Compton’s focus on the home as character. In this passage, the house has retained the residue of anger, as if the room has been ravaged by a storm:
People had certainly lived here. Families. In an area that served as a kitchen there were four chairs that seemed blown about the room. Two tilted against a far wall and the others sat upright but on opposite sides of the room. There were dishes in a cancerous sink.
But there’s hope, and I’ll go ahead and tell you Compton has saved the antidote that will calm the storm until the last story, the last stroke. Redemption and the relief from pain come through family, through a moment shared between father and son. Is this a message? Am I allowed to look for one? And if I’ve found one, does it matter if none was intended? I know one thing: if I were a character in one of these stories, I’d be looking for a sign from God that one day all my efforts would pay off, that I would someday be whole.
Posted originally at Books at Fictionaut
May 4, 2015
In short, Sheldon Lee Compton is a master-class short story writer. Every sentence of his prose is gorgeous without being overworked and reaches out to the reader with an electric jolt. This is raw, thrumming, thrashing, breathing and biting storytelling. I have no doubt that the pieces in this collection will one day be taught in college fiction writing classes. If you want to know what a real short story looks like, sounds like and feels like- pick up Compton's The Same Terrible Storm now.
February 12, 2015
Sheldon Lee Compton is the definition of what Faulkner meant when he described the closeness between the short story writer and the poet, saying, "the short story...is the most demanding form after poetry." A story like "The Son of a Man" in THE SAME TERRIBLE STORM isn't so much a story as it is prose poetry. Compton doesn't write paragraphs, but rather indented stanzas: "The preacher is a vapor, easing through the aisles, touching the shoulders of a woman, meeting the lost gaze of a man holding a hymn book like a gutted fish. He is here, but he is gone, easing in and out like wind through a braid of feathers. He bends close to each of them and whispers. He tells them all is not lost. He tells them it is never too late." The whole collection is incredible, but the story that will stick with me longest, I expect, is "Discount Paint For Houses." This is literature you should be reading.
March 12, 2015
The fierce poetry of these stories seems not so much written as chiseled out of the hard Kentucky ridges that SLC calls home. A must-read if you are a fan of Breece D'J Pancake. The final image of "Intruder"--a story which imagines the final day of Pancake's life--is as powerful and haunting as anything I've read. I'm not sure what makes these East Kentucky/West Virginia boys so good--maybe it's a little coal in the blood.
April 11, 2015
This beautiful book of stories is like an unofficial sequel to the movie Days of Thunder, except not at all. Sheldon Lee Compton is like a living, breathing John Cougar Mellencamp song (minus guitars and hand claps) but with much better stories.
November 22, 2014
Here’s the beginning of Sheldon Lee Compton’s story “Fight:”
Don’t know about you, but might as well reel me in a fillet me because that is one hell of a hook stuck in my gullet. And that is just one of the excellent stories you will find in The Same Terrible Storm, which is a dense and edgy blend of flash fiction and short stories that all have the urgency of lived life, and by that I mean that none of these stories have that stale feel of constructed fiction. You read these stories and you just know that blood was spilled before these words found their way to the page. So many fine stories in this collection, but the story that blew me away on every level: language, character, construction, and with just flat out one of the most riveting final scenes this side of Lee K. Abbott’s “One of Star Wars, One of Doom” was “A Dark River’s Silt.” After reading this story you may never think of a halo the same again.
I take my Case knife and cut another IV tube. All that juice pops loose, flows steady onto the bed sheets. The last of whatever they were giving me moves warm like a fever through my vein, comes flapping out of the tube from the bend in my arm. I lay back and start waiting. This is getting to be less and less fun.
Don’t know about you, but might as well reel me in a fillet me because that is one hell of a hook stuck in my gullet. And that is just one of the excellent stories you will find in The Same Terrible Storm, which is a dense and edgy blend of flash fiction and short stories that all have the urgency of lived life, and by that I mean that none of these stories have that stale feel of constructed fiction. You read these stories and you just know that blood was spilled before these words found their way to the page. So many fine stories in this collection, but the story that blew me away on every level: language, character, construction, and with just flat out one of the most riveting final scenes this side of Lee K. Abbott’s “One of Star Wars, One of Doom” was “A Dark River’s Silt.” After reading this story you may never think of a halo the same again.
December 31, 2012
Halfway through this and already I'd like to go back to the first story, start again just for the pure pleasure of it. I'll have much more to say about this one but man, call it grit or Appalachian lit or Southern lit or whatever you like, there's a resonance here that goes wide and deep. Update: start to finish, has to be one of my most pleasurable reading experiences this year. Can't wait to see more from Sheldon.
January 18, 2016
This is a brilliant book by Sheldon Compton, one of our finest short story writers in the independent publishing world. I was fortunate enough to interview Shel ("Lil' Joe") at the Lit Pub: http://thelitpub.com/featured-books/t.... I wish this author all the fortune in the world.
August 29, 2017
A good hit
I really like Compton's work and this collection -- his first -- illustrates why. Each story is like a quick, solid punch: first you feel them on your skin as they knock the wind out of you; then the ache spreads to your insides. Indie lit offers the chance to read some excellent work. Mr Compton proves that.
I really like Compton's work and this collection -- his first -- illustrates why. Each story is like a quick, solid punch: first you feel them on your skin as they knock the wind out of you; then the ache spreads to your insides. Indie lit offers the chance to read some excellent work. Mr Compton proves that.
June 15, 2015
There are at least two ways that I enjoy a book. One is the story itself. The other is the artistry of the prose. Sheldon Lee Compton is excellent at both, but in my view he is outstanding in the latter. Some of his paragraphs are perfectly woven artworks.
July 1, 2014
Strong debut! I appreciated the imaginative structure of each story and his infusion of the word 'bent/bending' as a repeating action. Very good.
August 25, 2025
These stories feel less written than excavated from a Kentucky mine, as if Sheldon Lee Compton dug them from the shale and coal seams of eastern Kentucky and let the dust speak for itself. Each piece carries the sting of a quick body blow, first felt on the skin, then sinking inward until it lodges deep in the ribs. The ache is slow to subside, and it lingers for weeks.
There is kinship here to Breece D’J Pancake, not in imitation but in spirit. The land is harsh, the people harder, and Compton carves them into being with sentences that cut clean and leave their mark. In “Intruder,” he imagines Pancake’s final day, and the image that closes the tale is one you will not shake. It is less a story than a haunting.
What sets Compton apart is not only the lives he records but the way he records them. The prose itself is a kind of fierce poetry; paragraphs woven so tight they feel inevitable, like something a century of bad weather had shaped rather than man. His artistry is never showy, never soft. It is exact, durable, beautiful in its severity. Just the way I like it.
Indie lit promises discoveries like this: voices working outside the noise of the market, still loyal to truth and craft. With The Same Terrible Storm, Compton proves that Appalachia still breeds writers who can turn ruin and survival into art.
Rating: 5 big bright Stars
This collection is both brutal and graceful, as fine as anything written from these ridges in a generation. Every page rings true, every story bears weight. Sheldon Lee Compton has written a book to stand beside the very best of Appalachian authors. I'm a huge fan.
There is kinship here to Breece D’J Pancake, not in imitation but in spirit. The land is harsh, the people harder, and Compton carves them into being with sentences that cut clean and leave their mark. In “Intruder,” he imagines Pancake’s final day, and the image that closes the tale is one you will not shake. It is less a story than a haunting.
What sets Compton apart is not only the lives he records but the way he records them. The prose itself is a kind of fierce poetry; paragraphs woven so tight they feel inevitable, like something a century of bad weather had shaped rather than man. His artistry is never showy, never soft. It is exact, durable, beautiful in its severity. Just the way I like it.
Indie lit promises discoveries like this: voices working outside the noise of the market, still loyal to truth and craft. With The Same Terrible Storm, Compton proves that Appalachia still breeds writers who can turn ruin and survival into art.
Rating: 5 big bright Stars
This collection is both brutal and graceful, as fine as anything written from these ridges in a generation. Every page rings true, every story bears weight. Sheldon Lee Compton has written a book to stand beside the very best of Appalachian authors. I'm a huge fan.
May 30, 2021
This is a devastatingly beautiful collection of short stories. Place describes the the human and physical characteristics of a location and Sheldon Compton paints a harsh and vivid picture of Kentucky and its inhabitants. His prose is poetic and you must read each story more than once to appreciate it. The characters are varied and yet he so eloquently expresses their love, frustration, helplessness, and anger realistically. It is extraordinary that he can express so much truth in each story no matter its length.
July 24, 2020
Another great book from one of my favorite authors. If you haven't read Compton, you are missing out. Southern noir at its best.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews