SIDLE CREEK

A debut story collection set in the Appalachian Mountains.

Like fictional Sidle Creek, wandering through rural western Pennsylvania, McIlwain’s stories wind through the same country, touching down in the lives of locals. Here is the new widower in “The Fractal Geometry of Grief,” besotted with a fawn who appears in his yard one day, trying to save her as he could not save his wife. Here’s Tiller, the protagonist of “Shell,” who can read the future in the natural world and one day discovers news on a red-winged blackbird egg that he doesn’t want to know. Here’s the closeted gay cafe owner in “Those Red Boots” who inadvertently puts his waitresses at risk by making them wear old cheerleading uniforms and sexy boots. Here, nature is restorative and healing. In the title story, a teenage girl tries to cure her endometriosis by placing stones from Sidle Creek on her belly: “I could feel the Sidle’s love walking deep inside. It made me want to live.” While fracking and mining are alluded to, the book seems blissfully (or foolishly?) disengaged from the climate crisis, as though there are still pockets of nature untouched by human activity. Still, McIlwain writes beautifully of the work that people do: the sawmill owner who knows “the type of the wood or how wet it is by the sound it makes when it meets the blade”; the farmer who “could handle overripened tomatoes without bruising them”; and the four tween girls who spend their summer caring for a woman with a high-risk pregnancy. At the same time, a few stories get invested in extending metaphors at the expense of illuminating human heartache. And while the conflict between amoral city men and vigilante country folk may flare up sometimes in real life, it feels tired here.

Stories about a timeless rural America.