I think Ron Rash is one of the great writers of his generation, this powerful collection set against the landscape of the rugged Appalachians and a people whose identity is married to their environment. Rash has a masterful command of language ("a big old sow belly that sways side to side when he takes a notion to work") and an instinct for the tales that define his characters. Certainly, that dramatic terrain plays a major role in this collection, a hardscrabble land that demands endurance and breeds stubbornness, the situations that cut to the quick, life and death turning on a moment. Rash understand these people and this place, speaks their terrible truths to the uninitiated, from the God-fearing to the cold-hearted, from the Civil War to the Depression to current days, when methamphetamine has taken on critical mass in decimating a vulnerable population.

In "Dead Confederates", a basically honest, but financially hard-pressed man agrees to raid Confederate graves with another in the dark of night, hoping to score enough cash to pay his mother's hospital bills. But this adventure turns sour early on, yielding some reward but a lifetime of vivid nightmares. For me, the first story, "Hard Times" is the most poignant and emotionally stunning, a perfect example of Rash's ability to contrast the morality of necessity when food is scarce. The resolution is illuminating, revealing much about a man and the culprit he discovers stealing eggs from his henhouse at a time when pride and hunger have their own consequences.

Rash's adult characters face their decisions with a certain stoicism, but it is the children who leave a lasting imprint, like the young boy in "The Ascent" who discovers two dead bodies frozen in the wreckage of a small aircraft in the Great Smokies. He treasures his booty, only to be confronted by his parents' weakness for the pipe, his only comfort a retreat to the world of fantasy. The scourge of drugs appears again in "Back of Beyond", where a pawnbroker purchases items from a steady stream of addicts only to recognize a gun from his brother's home. A visit to his brother brings a cold dash of reality, a mother shivering in the bitter cold of a ratty trailer, her stubborn defense "that stuff has done made my boy crazy".

To read this author's prose is to appreciate the depth and breadth of his appreciation for the people and stories of Appalachia past and present, where character is defined by place and situation and change suspicious and untrustworthy. But even this great repository of American history has been sullied by a deadly drug that leeches the spirit from its victims, as deadly as the plague. Rash knows this history and doles it out in small, pungent bites. Luan Gaines/2010.