Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > Appalachian Horror > Status Update

Robin planned on taking hundreds of pictures in Chamlett. Look at the poverty in Appalachia. See the cracked, scarred hands of the old women. Hovels in the hills with corrugated tin walls. The thick smoke rising from breaking chimneys. A region mired in its own filth, a people mistaking their own death throes for survival.

It looked ridiculously small, but neither one of them were about to complain. It was the first shelter they had seen since straying off the Appalachian Trail and, although they weren’t about say it, both men wondered if this was a sign that they had finally stumbled back onto it. They were asleep as soon as they lay down. And they both dreamed of dead things.

When they finally reached the shelf of rock, their bodies doused in sweat and their legs laced with burning, copper wires, they were disheartened to see that they had already used up most of the day’s light. Worse still, the scene before them was a seamless, hilly carpet of forest that stretched in all directions to a horizon that looked to be a hundred lifetimes away.

The night passed badly for both men. They lied awake for most the night, listening to the wind hammer at their flimsy tents and to a spattering of flint-like rain that drifted over a shade or two past midnight. And then there was the screaming. The crying. The wailing. Some of it was distant and barely audible in the wind, but some of it was closer to home. Neither one of them went out to investigate.