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Coal Black: Stories
Coal Black is unfiltered mountain crime. Set in the hills of eastern Kentucky, these tales lay bare the dark realities of the region. Sometimes the backdrop is the opioid epidemic and all the human detritus and bloodshed that comes with it. Other times it’s poachers or petty thieves who take center stage, people whose wild desperation invite danger everywhere they go. High in the hills the action takes place, alongside the rarely seen animals who hunt up there, and sometimes alongside the “haints” and spirits of popular folklore.
The stories are full of action, twists and turns, and characters on both sides of the law who navigate the treacherous, often violent terrain that spares so few. Coal Black is a collection of gritty crime stories—cleverly drawn tales with sometimes savage surprise endings.
Praise for COAL
“Chris McGinley’s aptly named Coal Black grabs the reader by the shirt collar and doesn’t turn loose. These stories are as dark as the coal that is no longer in the mountains McGinley writes about, channeling the haints of Donald Ray Pollock and Frank Bill while speaking in a hard-edged voice that is undoubtedly the author’s own. These are tough tales about tough people and I can’t imagine someone picking up this book and not being impressed. I know I was.” —Charles Dodd White, author of In the House of Wilderness
“Mesmerizing and intense, the stories in Coal Black are a treat to read, every honed sentence reminding us that we’re in excellent hands as we travel into the darkness of haunting crime and equally haunted countryside. This collection rocks.” —Rusty Barnes, author of The Ridgerunner and The Last Danger
“Brutal yet beautiful, sparse but with moments of lush emotional resonance, Chris McGinley’s debut collection of short fiction, Coal Black, heralds a new and necessary voice in crime fiction. The prose is so sharp that it begs to be read slowly, to linger with the reader, as McGinley’s stories explore the effects of a lost industry and the devastation of opioids in rural Appalachia. Rarely have I come across a debut so assured. This is a book that deserves an audience, and stories that deserve to be remembered.” —E.A. Aymar, author of Unrepentant
“These stories offer some of the best rural noir you’ll ever read. They are a pitch-black journey into the heart of America.” —Nick Kolakowski, author of Maxine Unleashes Doomsday
“Oh. My. God. Have y’all read Chris McGinley’s Coal Stories ? If not, hasten to them. This shit is brilliant, this shit is real. It launches with ‘Hellbenders’ and doesn’t slow down. Lord, this is great story telling. It’s Appalachians trying to survive, trying to get past the mines. If that means drugs, so be it. As McGinley writes in ‘These Hills,’ ‘All this shit around us. Drugs, poverty, sickness. The forest is the only good thing left around here.’ Beautifully written stories; this is a stunning collection.” —Rob Peirce, author of Tommy Shakes
“Artfully crafted crime and horror set in Appalachia’s mountains—with prose that hits like Thor. McGinley mines the veins of early American bedrock writers like Irving, Poe and Hawthorne. His tales burn hot and dark.” —Jesse “Heels” Rawlins, crime writer and editor at The Flash Fiction Offensive
The stories are full of action, twists and turns, and characters on both sides of the law who navigate the treacherous, often violent terrain that spares so few. Coal Black is a collection of gritty crime stories—cleverly drawn tales with sometimes savage surprise endings.
Praise for COAL
“Chris McGinley’s aptly named Coal Black grabs the reader by the shirt collar and doesn’t turn loose. These stories are as dark as the coal that is no longer in the mountains McGinley writes about, channeling the haints of Donald Ray Pollock and Frank Bill while speaking in a hard-edged voice that is undoubtedly the author’s own. These are tough tales about tough people and I can’t imagine someone picking up this book and not being impressed. I know I was.” —Charles Dodd White, author of In the House of Wilderness
“Mesmerizing and intense, the stories in Coal Black are a treat to read, every honed sentence reminding us that we’re in excellent hands as we travel into the darkness of haunting crime and equally haunted countryside. This collection rocks.” —Rusty Barnes, author of The Ridgerunner and The Last Danger
“Brutal yet beautiful, sparse but with moments of lush emotional resonance, Chris McGinley’s debut collection of short fiction, Coal Black, heralds a new and necessary voice in crime fiction. The prose is so sharp that it begs to be read slowly, to linger with the reader, as McGinley’s stories explore the effects of a lost industry and the devastation of opioids in rural Appalachia. Rarely have I come across a debut so assured. This is a book that deserves an audience, and stories that deserve to be remembered.” —E.A. Aymar, author of Unrepentant
“These stories offer some of the best rural noir you’ll ever read. They are a pitch-black journey into the heart of America.” —Nick Kolakowski, author of Maxine Unleashes Doomsday
“Oh. My. God. Have y’all read Chris McGinley’s Coal Stories ? If not, hasten to them. This shit is brilliant, this shit is real. It launches with ‘Hellbenders’ and doesn’t slow down. Lord, this is great story telling. It’s Appalachians trying to survive, trying to get past the mines. If that means drugs, so be it. As McGinley writes in ‘These Hills,’ ‘All this shit around us. Drugs, poverty, sickness. The forest is the only good thing left around here.’ Beautifully written stories; this is a stunning collection.” —Rob Peirce, author of Tommy Shakes
“Artfully crafted crime and horror set in Appalachia’s mountains—with prose that hits like Thor. McGinley mines the veins of early American bedrock writers like Irving, Poe and Hawthorne. His tales burn hot and dark.” —Jesse “Heels” Rawlins, crime writer and editor at The Flash Fiction Offensive
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
180 pages, Paperback
Published December 12, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 27, 2022
“By God, Black lung,” the preacher said, his cigarette bobbing up and down, “Coal keeps us and kills us, don't it?”
*****
COAL BLACK is the kind of story collection that should replace the hoary old Vintage Contemporaries realists in college classrooms; Raymond Carver and Richard Ford and their fussy, fusty domestic dramas and flyover-tourism tales seem like pikers and pretenders against these tales of Appalachia and Appalachians as told only by one who grew up alongside them, has clinked bottle tops with them in bars and nodded awkwardly to them in the parking lots of Kwik Marts. And it's not just a matter of authenticity in the America we see around us today, but of prose that never wastes a word, that never misses a beat, that never fails to advance and deepen character and conflict without ever calling attention to itself in form or function.
And these stories — and there's not a clunker or even middling effort in the bunch — are not just important and truthful and all that necessary high-mindedness, but there's absolute rippers, rockers, ravers and roarers. Pure entertainment., as pitch-perfect as the blues guitarist in the band at the bar and as gracefully mesmerizing as the drunk woman dancing atop the table to his music.
And as you're being knocked out, you'll learn a lot you didn't know about Appalachia and Appalachians, not from the reductive portraits of ir in popular culture as a region of toothless, coal-smoking trailer-dwellers smiling opioid idiot grins. Those people can be found in COAL BLACK, but you'd can't find them without finding out how they got there, and what their meager options are, and as you read them, you'll find yourself realizing the lie that HILLBILLY ELEGY and its revisionist, reactionary ilk portray of the region: There's no bootstrapping your way out of a place when you don't even have a bootstrap to begin with.
The people of COAL BLACK are dopesick, superstitious, poor, wretched and violent. And unwilling to lay fault at their own feet. They're also clever, even smart sometimes, and even though what they try to do about their circumstances are rarely the right things to do, they're trying to get up and off the couch and, maybe, just maybe, out of town, our of the region, out of their raising, hoping for that most American of achievements: reinvention.
Some favorites:
"HELLBENDERS" tells what happens up on an isolated mountain when a crusading sheriff collides with the local drug baron, and how their killing agendas collide with a strangely graceful understanding of one another. As the dealer tells the lawman: "I had it as bad as any of these people. My father died of black lung and my mother died of cancer, once the company stopped paying benefits when my dad died. I just saw a way out and took it. Not saying it’s righteous, though. It ain’t.”
In "COAL BLACK HAINT," the ghosts of women done mortally wrong live on forever in the hills to avenge their present-day sisters in peril: "She learned that, like so many young girls in eastern Kentucky, Charlotte wanted love. The love of a father she didn’t have. The love of a mother she didn’t know she had. And the love of a man she didn’t need."
In "THESE HILLS," an enterprising lowlife steals and sells snakes and Western elm bark to keep his grieving mother in pills, which offends the local game warden as much as the opioids: "All this s**t around us. Drugs, poverty, sickness. The forest is the only good thing left around here.”
In "WITH HAIR BLACKER THAN COAL," an old woman warns a sheriff that there are worse things in the deep hills that the poachers he's planning to pursue: “They’re a pox on these hills. I only hope they go too far. Beyond that notch up there is where they’re headed. There’s bear dens up there, and God knows what else. Don’t follow them too far, sheriff. What’s up there can’t tell between good and not good. That’s a dark wood up there, is what my grandfather called it. Anyone that hunts up there is just as like to be hunted. You be careful.” But he goes, and what he encounters triggers his worse memories of his service in Vietnam.
In THE FEMALES ESPECIALLY, a wronged woman scrapes by the only way she knows how, by robbing local convenience stores. But when she is given a chance to extend a sliver of grace, she never realized that opens the door in her mind and heart to a little grace for herself. As she learns during a stretch in prison: "Some small part of her admired the grit of the women, the way they carried on even though the odds were against them, their will to create some love where there was none. They seemed to view their criminal lives as just another fact of mountain culture, the lot of the wronged woman, and they took it in stride."
My personal favorite is "RIVER OF NINE DRAGONS," in which a sheriff's memory of an atrocity he witnessed in Vietnam comes to back to him in the present day when a pair of ginseng poachers set their sights on a patch owned by a Vietnamese man resettled in eastern Kentucky hill country, with the fever dreams of the past taking on agonized texture as he sets off up a mountain in defense of the immigrant. That begins with this stiletto thrust of an exchange:
“'I don’t know, sheriff,” Fred said over the phone. 'I think maybe one of them Vietnamese got shot. Maybe. But I ain’t for certain. I couldn’t understand the lady who come in here. I only know that you should check it out. Somethin’ happened, is all I know. Be careful, though. I wouldn’t go down there if you paid me. Don’t much care for selling them gasoline, either. Buncha trash in that holler, you ask me.'"
"Curley said it for the hundredth time, 'Fred, the people will never fit in here if you don’t give them a chance.'
“'I ain’t talkin’ about the Vietnamese,” Fred said and hung up."
For the thieves, their crime isn't the real crime: "What the hell? Really? For stealing from them bastards? They come over here and act like the place is theirs. It ain’t really even stealing, is it? I mean, it’s our ginseng, right? Our hills.”
*****
COAL BLACK is the kind of story collection that should replace the hoary old Vintage Contemporaries realists in college classrooms; Raymond Carver and Richard Ford and their fussy, fusty domestic dramas and flyover-tourism tales seem like pikers and pretenders against these tales of Appalachia and Appalachians as told only by one who grew up alongside them, has clinked bottle tops with them in bars and nodded awkwardly to them in the parking lots of Kwik Marts. And it's not just a matter of authenticity in the America we see around us today, but of prose that never wastes a word, that never misses a beat, that never fails to advance and deepen character and conflict without ever calling attention to itself in form or function.
And these stories — and there's not a clunker or even middling effort in the bunch — are not just important and truthful and all that necessary high-mindedness, but there's absolute rippers, rockers, ravers and roarers. Pure entertainment., as pitch-perfect as the blues guitarist in the band at the bar and as gracefully mesmerizing as the drunk woman dancing atop the table to his music.
And as you're being knocked out, you'll learn a lot you didn't know about Appalachia and Appalachians, not from the reductive portraits of ir in popular culture as a region of toothless, coal-smoking trailer-dwellers smiling opioid idiot grins. Those people can be found in COAL BLACK, but you'd can't find them without finding out how they got there, and what their meager options are, and as you read them, you'll find yourself realizing the lie that HILLBILLY ELEGY and its revisionist, reactionary ilk portray of the region: There's no bootstrapping your way out of a place when you don't even have a bootstrap to begin with.
The people of COAL BLACK are dopesick, superstitious, poor, wretched and violent. And unwilling to lay fault at their own feet. They're also clever, even smart sometimes, and even though what they try to do about their circumstances are rarely the right things to do, they're trying to get up and off the couch and, maybe, just maybe, out of town, our of the region, out of their raising, hoping for that most American of achievements: reinvention.
Some favorites:
"HELLBENDERS" tells what happens up on an isolated mountain when a crusading sheriff collides with the local drug baron, and how their killing agendas collide with a strangely graceful understanding of one another. As the dealer tells the lawman: "I had it as bad as any of these people. My father died of black lung and my mother died of cancer, once the company stopped paying benefits when my dad died. I just saw a way out and took it. Not saying it’s righteous, though. It ain’t.”
In "COAL BLACK HAINT," the ghosts of women done mortally wrong live on forever in the hills to avenge their present-day sisters in peril: "She learned that, like so many young girls in eastern Kentucky, Charlotte wanted love. The love of a father she didn’t have. The love of a mother she didn’t know she had. And the love of a man she didn’t need."
In "THESE HILLS," an enterprising lowlife steals and sells snakes and Western elm bark to keep his grieving mother in pills, which offends the local game warden as much as the opioids: "All this s**t around us. Drugs, poverty, sickness. The forest is the only good thing left around here.”
In "WITH HAIR BLACKER THAN COAL," an old woman warns a sheriff that there are worse things in the deep hills that the poachers he's planning to pursue: “They’re a pox on these hills. I only hope they go too far. Beyond that notch up there is where they’re headed. There’s bear dens up there, and God knows what else. Don’t follow them too far, sheriff. What’s up there can’t tell between good and not good. That’s a dark wood up there, is what my grandfather called it. Anyone that hunts up there is just as like to be hunted. You be careful.” But he goes, and what he encounters triggers his worse memories of his service in Vietnam.
In THE FEMALES ESPECIALLY, a wronged woman scrapes by the only way she knows how, by robbing local convenience stores. But when she is given a chance to extend a sliver of grace, she never realized that opens the door in her mind and heart to a little grace for herself. As she learns during a stretch in prison: "Some small part of her admired the grit of the women, the way they carried on even though the odds were against them, their will to create some love where there was none. They seemed to view their criminal lives as just another fact of mountain culture, the lot of the wronged woman, and they took it in stride."
My personal favorite is "RIVER OF NINE DRAGONS," in which a sheriff's memory of an atrocity he witnessed in Vietnam comes to back to him in the present day when a pair of ginseng poachers set their sights on a patch owned by a Vietnamese man resettled in eastern Kentucky hill country, with the fever dreams of the past taking on agonized texture as he sets off up a mountain in defense of the immigrant. That begins with this stiletto thrust of an exchange:
“'I don’t know, sheriff,” Fred said over the phone. 'I think maybe one of them Vietnamese got shot. Maybe. But I ain’t for certain. I couldn’t understand the lady who come in here. I only know that you should check it out. Somethin’ happened, is all I know. Be careful, though. I wouldn’t go down there if you paid me. Don’t much care for selling them gasoline, either. Buncha trash in that holler, you ask me.'"
"Curley said it for the hundredth time, 'Fred, the people will never fit in here if you don’t give them a chance.'
“'I ain’t talkin’ about the Vietnamese,” Fred said and hung up."
For the thieves, their crime isn't the real crime: "What the hell? Really? For stealing from them bastards? They come over here and act like the place is theirs. It ain’t really even stealing, is it? I mean, it’s our ginseng, right? Our hills.”
May 31, 2022
It is truly special when you read fiction that doesn’t feel at all fictional, where the author seems to disappear and you’re looking through a window at a world populated with real people who have pasts that extend far beyond the page, and where some—not all—have futures. This is certainly the case with “Coal Black”, one of the best collections of its kind since William Gay’s “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down”. While the rhythm and cadence of the prose might be more accessible than Gay’s work, the writing is lovely in its own right, and only adds to the collection’s authenticity and masterful pacing.
The collection has a strong connection to the land, its histories, and tragedies. The woods and mountains and hollers are living breathing characters in each story, characters that suffer their own versions of black lung alongside their inhabitants. McGinley reminds us that the land came before the people, and different people before them. The most powerful stories here reference Native history, reaching beyond the Shawnee and Cherokee to the Adena people who populated Appalachia several millennia ago.
There is plenty of violence and bleakness to the character arcs, an almost noirish, nihilistic fatefulness. This is what makes Southern Gothic fiction great—the juxtaposition of squalor and violence atop beautiful, ancient landscapes. It’s a disorienting clash that can only produce one conclusion: the land doesn’t care whether we succeed, whether we live or die. It will inevitably repurpose our flesh and bones into its timeless clockwork and forget us.
If you are even remotely interested in Appalachian fiction, this book deserves a prominent spot on your bookshelf.
The collection has a strong connection to the land, its histories, and tragedies. The woods and mountains and hollers are living breathing characters in each story, characters that suffer their own versions of black lung alongside their inhabitants. McGinley reminds us that the land came before the people, and different people before them. The most powerful stories here reference Native history, reaching beyond the Shawnee and Cherokee to the Adena people who populated Appalachia several millennia ago.
There is plenty of violence and bleakness to the character arcs, an almost noirish, nihilistic fatefulness. This is what makes Southern Gothic fiction great—the juxtaposition of squalor and violence atop beautiful, ancient landscapes. It’s a disorienting clash that can only produce one conclusion: the land doesn’t care whether we succeed, whether we live or die. It will inevitably repurpose our flesh and bones into its timeless clockwork and forget us.
If you are even remotely interested in Appalachian fiction, this book deserves a prominent spot on your bookshelf.
December 24, 2019
This beautifully written collection came along late in 2019 to become the most memorable thing I've read all year. Beyond the way Chris McGinley uses language, he deploys the Kentucky settings he obviously knows well to tremendous effect, especially the natural world. He also conjures up an array of great characters on both sides of the law. "Conjures" is also a very fitting word for a collection that draws heavily on the supernatural in a powerful way. Modern themes (the opioid crisis) meet old-time folklore in a winning combination.
July 11, 2020
Very much enjoyed every story in this book. I live in eastern KY myself, and the author described the area and the people perfectly. Gripping, gritty, emotional, spooky. Loved it. Look so forward to more by this author. He will definitely be going places. Reminds me of Donald Ray Pollack.
May 28, 2022
The late great Barry Hannah liked to declare this about writing stories: “You get in, you get out.” I suppose that saying could be reasonably interpreted in more than one way, and sometimes I’ve wondered if Hannah himself could or would say what he was getting at. In any case, for me it’s always meant something like “make sure your story does everything it’s supposed to, but nothing more.”
A fine example of how to do that across a whole collection is Chris McGinley’s Coal Black. His stories, set in the ruined hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky, depict how coal companies, drugs, hollowed-out towns, and blurred lines between right and wrong sustain as well as ravage generations. It’s no minimization of the impact of these stories or of McGinley’s artistry to say that each piece shows what an adept builder of fiction he is. There are three features of his writing that deserve special mention.
The first is the wonderfully transparent quality of his language. I think we sometimes wrongly limit praise of a writer’s style to language that, for whatever reason, draws attention to itself in a way that gives pleasure to the reader. There’s not really anything wrong with writing like that, but I don’t to overlook the ways in which language like McGinley’s also deserves praise in terms of style. He writes so as to show with precise and evocative detail places, people, and situations, with rightly modulated emotional effect, but without causing the reader to shift focus from what’s being shown to the language that shows it. That’s damn hard to do as consistently and as effectively as McGinley accomplishes it in this collection.
This example comes from “Coal Black Haint” (my favorite in the collection):
"The woman lived in an old trailer in a holler of pockmarked single-wides and simple frame structures that sagged at the roofs. Here and there an old car sat on blocks amongst the weeds that had taken over. Plastic lawn chairs gone grey sat on porches and front lawns. Near the tops of the hills that rose up behind the holler, a white mist hung motionless."
Not a single word here does anything but point beyond itself. The result is a sensorily rich, rounded, and evocative description. McGinley also demonstrates here how acute his eye for detail is: “pockmarked single-wides” and “[p]lastic lawns chairs gone grey” are especially good.
Another quality to McGinley’s work is his weaving together of a grim-eyed realism with supernatural elements of mountain life, if that’s the phrase I mean. “Haints,” I’ve come to learn, are dead spirits, often angry and vengeful, but according to Appalachian historian Dave Talber, the term also applies to “an indefinable something that scares the bejeevers out of you.” Several of the stories involves haints, to varying degrees, and their presence, not surprising or distracting to the other characters, also doesn’t trip the reader up. You might not believe in haints yourself, but you’ll believe they exist in these stories just as much as bottomed out cars, kudzu, and way too much oxy.
The last strength to McGinley’s writing is his skillful shaping of theme. I find this a surprisingly affirming collection of stories, despite the often bootless violence, the stunted psyches and hopes, the environmental and economic devastation inflicted on his characters. The reason why is the theme the gradually emerges across the stories: Despite the myriad ravages suffered, the people of this land maintain ultimately unbreakable bonds with one another. And it’s impressive how many ways McGinley draws our attention to this. An apparently amoral drug dealer shoots down a sheriff, but in the man’s dying moments promises to bury him where he most wants. A gutless thief is moved by long-buried memories to return a stolen quit and to seek out the lonely old woman who made it. A sheriff prone to whipping out her baton for vicious use worries over how a group of filthy drug addicts will get home again from their lair. Read the stories and you’ll see more variations on this theme of enduring connection, whatever else might have been carried away.
People in the region represented in this excellent collection have a saying: “Coal keeps us and kills us.” McGinley doesn’t flinch from showing us the implications of that truth, and he does with masterful use of language and a keen, truthful sense of what can preserve humanity and community despite the violences we inflict on ourselves and one another. These aren’t necessarily always comfortable or comforting stories to read, but doing so anyway is how we can learn to see a little better in the coal black darkness of this world.
A fine example of how to do that across a whole collection is Chris McGinley’s Coal Black. His stories, set in the ruined hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky, depict how coal companies, drugs, hollowed-out towns, and blurred lines between right and wrong sustain as well as ravage generations. It’s no minimization of the impact of these stories or of McGinley’s artistry to say that each piece shows what an adept builder of fiction he is. There are three features of his writing that deserve special mention.
The first is the wonderfully transparent quality of his language. I think we sometimes wrongly limit praise of a writer’s style to language that, for whatever reason, draws attention to itself in a way that gives pleasure to the reader. There’s not really anything wrong with writing like that, but I don’t to overlook the ways in which language like McGinley’s also deserves praise in terms of style. He writes so as to show with precise and evocative detail places, people, and situations, with rightly modulated emotional effect, but without causing the reader to shift focus from what’s being shown to the language that shows it. That’s damn hard to do as consistently and as effectively as McGinley accomplishes it in this collection.
This example comes from “Coal Black Haint” (my favorite in the collection):
"The woman lived in an old trailer in a holler of pockmarked single-wides and simple frame structures that sagged at the roofs. Here and there an old car sat on blocks amongst the weeds that had taken over. Plastic lawn chairs gone grey sat on porches and front lawns. Near the tops of the hills that rose up behind the holler, a white mist hung motionless."
Not a single word here does anything but point beyond itself. The result is a sensorily rich, rounded, and evocative description. McGinley also demonstrates here how acute his eye for detail is: “pockmarked single-wides” and “[p]lastic lawns chairs gone grey” are especially good.
Another quality to McGinley’s work is his weaving together of a grim-eyed realism with supernatural elements of mountain life, if that’s the phrase I mean. “Haints,” I’ve come to learn, are dead spirits, often angry and vengeful, but according to Appalachian historian Dave Talber, the term also applies to “an indefinable something that scares the bejeevers out of you.” Several of the stories involves haints, to varying degrees, and their presence, not surprising or distracting to the other characters, also doesn’t trip the reader up. You might not believe in haints yourself, but you’ll believe they exist in these stories just as much as bottomed out cars, kudzu, and way too much oxy.
The last strength to McGinley’s writing is his skillful shaping of theme. I find this a surprisingly affirming collection of stories, despite the often bootless violence, the stunted psyches and hopes, the environmental and economic devastation inflicted on his characters. The reason why is the theme the gradually emerges across the stories: Despite the myriad ravages suffered, the people of this land maintain ultimately unbreakable bonds with one another. And it’s impressive how many ways McGinley draws our attention to this. An apparently amoral drug dealer shoots down a sheriff, but in the man’s dying moments promises to bury him where he most wants. A gutless thief is moved by long-buried memories to return a stolen quit and to seek out the lonely old woman who made it. A sheriff prone to whipping out her baton for vicious use worries over how a group of filthy drug addicts will get home again from their lair. Read the stories and you’ll see more variations on this theme of enduring connection, whatever else might have been carried away.
People in the region represented in this excellent collection have a saying: “Coal keeps us and kills us.” McGinley doesn’t flinch from showing us the implications of that truth, and he does with masterful use of language and a keen, truthful sense of what can preserve humanity and community despite the violences we inflict on ourselves and one another. These aren’t necessarily always comfortable or comforting stories to read, but doing so anyway is how we can learn to see a little better in the coal black darkness of this world.
October 20, 2024
grab a pint of Early Times, curl up in your mawmaw’s handmade quilt, and settle in for some darker-than-coal stories that—for better or worse—will absolutely transport you among the kudzu-covered squalor of a forgotten Kentucky holler populated by oxy addicts, rogue sheriffs, and haunting haints
March 10, 2020
I really enjoyed this collection of crime noir short stories set in Appalachia. Full disclosure, Chris McGinley, is a good friend and colleague of mine. I was unsure what to expect, as I've not read this genre before. I went to McGinley's book launch and he read "The Quilt"I was blown away. I was immediately drawn into this story that combines opioid addiction, relationship abuse, theft, love of a grandmother and quilting. All of that in one short story! I couldn't wait to read more. The stories are dark and sometimes violent but I couldn't put the book down. I was drawn into this world that McGinley created.
March 13, 2020
In this haunting, hard-to-put down story collection, a sense of place resonates through nearly every passage. Each story is deeply rooted in the book’s setting: the hills of eastern Kentucky, a place of both natural beauty and human struggle, and to certain characters, a place where figures from local folklore and legends sometimes feel just as real–and just as threatening–as a gun-toting thief or drug dealer.
This setting factors into both the motivations of the criminals who stalk the hills, and the types of crimes they commit. With local mines no longer offering steady jobs, or any jobs at all, certain citizens have turned to illegal activities just to get by, or to maintain the supply of opioids to which they’ve become addicted. These activities include a variety of hardscrabble crimes, such as petty theft, poaching wildlife on neighbors’ land, and selling bark that’s been stripped from slippery elms.
McGinley handles the supernatural elements of the stories deftly and chillingly, with otherworldly beings remaining mostly in the shadows of characters’ imaginations, until they become briefly–and startlingly–real.
For my review of the book, see https://smallpresspicks.com/coal-black/.
This setting factors into both the motivations of the criminals who stalk the hills, and the types of crimes they commit. With local mines no longer offering steady jobs, or any jobs at all, certain citizens have turned to illegal activities just to get by, or to maintain the supply of opioids to which they’ve become addicted. These activities include a variety of hardscrabble crimes, such as petty theft, poaching wildlife on neighbors’ land, and selling bark that’s been stripped from slippery elms.
McGinley handles the supernatural elements of the stories deftly and chillingly, with otherworldly beings remaining mostly in the shadows of characters’ imaginations, until they become briefly–and startlingly–real.
For my review of the book, see https://smallpresspicks.com/coal-black/.
August 9, 2021
Chris McGinley weaves the veins of Mother coal in the Eastern KY hills into ten unrepentant tales full of bleak beauty. All the stories are compelling but a few that stood out for me include, Ephraim finding his ancient ancestor on Caudill Mountain in "Kin to Me". My favorite character in the whole collection was the first female sheriff in "Coal Black Haint", Bertie Clemmons who suffers from emotional addiction to grief due to her missing daughter. Sheriff Curly Knott protects the residents of his county whether they want him to or not in two tales soaked in memory and mountain folklore in "With Hair Blacker than Coal" and "River of Nine Dragons". Take a ride through the hills and hollers with these stories. You won’t be sorry not even a little bit.
January 10, 2023
This is a superb set of short stories. The author self-deprecatingly calls them "genre fiction," but he sells the stories short. These are tight, unsentimental, often sad, but always authentic little pieces. CM has a knack for dialog, also a knack for not judging his characters.
Oh, I want to add that, although the stories are marketed as "crime," several of them also present themselves as ghost stories. I wonder if the author has been reading Algernon Blackwood or even M.R. James?
Highly recommended.
Oh, I want to add that, although the stories are marketed as "crime," several of them also present themselves as ghost stories. I wonder if the author has been reading Algernon Blackwood or even M.R. James?
Highly recommended.
February 7, 2020
Coal Black was an intensely fun read. I enjoyed all the short stories but my personal favorite was 'With Hair Blacker than Coal.' Highly recommend if you are into the genre or from eastern Kentucky like myself.
July 27, 2022
4.5 stars.
Love how McGinley adds horror/supernatural elements to these rural noir stories. Adds a unique and interesting layer to them that makes them even more enjoyable than they already are. Oh, and the writing is great!
Love how McGinley adds horror/supernatural elements to these rural noir stories. Adds a unique and interesting layer to them that makes them even more enjoyable than they already are. Oh, and the writing is great!
May 19, 2020
Excellent book written by my really good friend, very gritty and raw!
June 3, 2020
Amazing book of short stories. Dark and twisty and really satisfying!
July 27, 2020
A collection of well-crafted noir tales set in rural Kentucky.
April 16, 2021
This collection of stories has a ton of soul. Looking forward to reading more from McGinley.
August 31, 2021
Review coming.
November 25, 2021
Great selection of crime fiction stories. I look forward to more work from this author.
January 17, 2024
Short stories set in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Broken people, haints, dark woods, dark memories.
May 8, 2024
So realistic. Great storytelling. Very insightful.
February 6, 2026
Reminders that while humans might be the worst thing you could find in the woods, they aren’t the only thing.
February 5, 2022
This collection of crime stories has so much truth, so much heart, so much insight regarding the underbelly of an economically depressed society in Kentucky, that it could only come from a writer who has seen the things firsthand about which he writes.
These characters jump out as real people rather than stereotypes. They're multidimensional, properly motivated to act, and painted in layers. The little details matter to McGinley. A piece of clothing, a line of dialogue, the decay, the anger, the hopelessness, the guilt--any of these things bring the character to life. He can do in a single sentence what it takes other chapters to achieve.
McGinley has the storytelling ability of crime writers I love from the 1940s and 1950s: sparse, razor sharp prose that can devastate the reader with a single line. He does it in every story. You end up looking for it. When he achieves it, you think, "Goddamn, Chris," because he just punched you in the gut again. And, after you wince, it feels pretty damn good.
Absolute gem of a book that captures a subculture vividly.
These characters jump out as real people rather than stereotypes. They're multidimensional, properly motivated to act, and painted in layers. The little details matter to McGinley. A piece of clothing, a line of dialogue, the decay, the anger, the hopelessness, the guilt--any of these things bring the character to life. He can do in a single sentence what it takes other chapters to achieve.
McGinley has the storytelling ability of crime writers I love from the 1940s and 1950s: sparse, razor sharp prose that can devastate the reader with a single line. He does it in every story. You end up looking for it. When he achieves it, you think, "Goddamn, Chris," because he just punched you in the gut again. And, after you wince, it feels pretty damn good.
Absolute gem of a book that captures a subculture vividly.
October 19, 2024
Enjoyed reading this collection of East Kentucky rural noir...settings and characters were top notch...up to date stories with modern drugs of choice, that being oxy & fentynal....yet plot lines and troubles old as the hills with just a pinch of superstition & mysticism thrown in..the final three stories were outstanding and introduced two cool characters, sheriff curly Knott, an aging Vietnam vet law man who is a country version of Harry Bosch, featured in two stories, and, Cilia, star of the final story who is a near professional thief who finds her way out of trouble but is troubled by past relationships, so, she goes it alone. Yeah, I liked both characters very much, they could both be turned into lead characters in novel length books...the only take away is a few loose endings in a number of the stories. You could say they leave you in suspense but I would have liked to see more firm conclusions...other than that really good rural noir...I recommend!
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