IN THE VALLEY
by Ron Rash
Rash's latest is a collection of 10 stories anchored by a novella featuring the ruthless Serena Pemberton of his best-known novel, Serena (2008), as she returns to the U.S. and resumes her reign of terror. Though Serena has received the lion's share of attention, the short story has always been Rash's best genre. Several pieces collected here—mostly set in western North Carolina from the Civil War to the present—center on revenge that wants to see itself as righteous. Rash is expert at revealing the sword of vengeance's double edge—how honed it is, how it cuts whomever wields it. In the excellent "Flight," for example, Stacy, a wounded, justice-minded young park ranger, determines that she'll have the better of a local who keeps tauntingly poaching trout. Another standout is "The Belt," about an octogenarian Civil War veteran and his talisman, the lucky brass buckle that saved him in battle. His family has struggled mightily—that buckle's luck has never seemed transferable—but old Jubal hopes the luck might extend, in one last moment of crisis, to his namesake grandson, a toddler. Perhaps best of all is "L'homme Blessé," about a recently widowed art teacher summoned to a deep-country cabin where an old man, psychologically wrecked after World War II, lived out his days sheltered by his own art—a near-perfect re-creation of the drawings inside a French cave the shattered soldier had visited. But the title novella makes for the centerpiece. Unrepentant lumber queen Serena has returned home, where she needs to accomplish the impossible: clear-cut a last mountaintop forest in just days. To do so—with the help of her conscienceless enforcer, Galloway, and his terrifying, spooky mother—she must bribe, cajole, intimidate, murder, perhaps even bend the rules of time, but there's little Serena can't do. Sure, now and again Rash tries to channel Cormac McCarthy and fails; a couple stories seem slight; and so on. But those are quibbles, not disfiguring flaws.
A brace of strong stories, and the novella's a fine, suspenseful contribution to the thriving genre of Appalachian mayhem.