Ron Rash

[[Ron Rash]] flickered onto my radar with several stories in literary journals. His simple, straightforward style brings something to the typical Appalachian Gothic that is often missing, a keen eye for the people, place, and sensibility. This one, a longer form than I've read from him before, elongates the story without complicating it - Rash doesn't need complex plots to tell a good story. In this story, a near-retired Sheriff is pitted against a destination-hotel developer, with a show more crotchety local and a park ranger in the middle. The mystery isn't terribly difficult to figure out, but Rash doesn't intend it to be. What he spends his time on is the character's lives and back-stories, fleshing out their choices and motivations. If you are about to read about where crawdads sing, read this instead - read it twice instead.

5 bones!!!!!
Highly recommended show less

This is the best collection of short stories I have ever read. Each one is a mini-novel, fully fleshed out, raw and bruising and intimate. Rash uses the first person in each of the stories, and that sense of listening to a person tell their own story is captivating. It is like sitting across the table from someone and having them say, “I will tell you something that happened to me, and you will wish you didn’t, but you will believe it.”

I have consciously avoided reading Ron Rash over show more the past four years. I read his novel, [b:Serena|2815590|Serena|Ron Rash|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347430224l/2815590._SX50_.jpg|2841515], in 2016 and I disliked it more in retrospect than I even did when I had first finished it. I thought Rash a good writer, but I also thought he would likely not write anything that would have real appeal for me, since I had been assured by more than one person that [b:Serena|2815590|Serena|Ron Rash|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347430224l/2815590._SX50_.jpg|2841515] was his best, his finest, and his defined style. I had another of his books sitting on my physical bookshelf and I put it, unread, in the giveaways when I moved. I am now wishing I had held on to it and given Rash another try.

Moving away from my mistakes and back to this powerful collection, I must say that Rash views the human condition from the underbelly a lot of the time. His characters are frequently already beaten down by life and social position, or they find themselves in situations that the reader realises are sure to go bad at any moment. There is a kind of tension that permeates the stories, keeping you on the edge of your seat waiting for the axe to fall, and sometimes you become so involved that you feel when it does it will fall on you and not on the fictional person at all.

Rash is also not afraid to draw on his store of literary knowledge and life experience to add reality to his stories. In the story, Free Bird, the Lynyrd Skynyrd song plays a major role and we are treated to a reference to Flem Snopes. These references made the story, and the protagonist, come alive for me. His descriptions of The Last Chance bar and its occupants were so vivid that I felt I had stumbled into the dive joint and could smell the vomit and alcohol.

The range of people and situations is wide here. Not one story mimics or recalls another. They are set in different places and different centuries, but each and every one of them works. And, the final test of a great short story for me, not one of them feels unfinished or truncated. Rash knows exactly when to get out. Taking a hint for that last line, I believe it is time I “got out” as well. Read this! show less

There are masterful stories in this collection. A grieving art professor takes comfort in paintings on the walls of a house done by a GI who copied them from deep in a cave in France during the war.

A widow whose late husband fought for the confederacy tries to conceal it from her northern leaning neighbors.

Bad neighbors, good people, evil doings in North Carolina, both in the past and present. The only one that fell flat for me was a novella based on Rash's character Serena Pemberton, the show more subject of a previous novel. show less

A+ for writing: characterization, plot, setting. Technically, his writing is head and shoulders above anything I've read in ages.
Flunk for subject matter.
Nice try on the banality of evil, but no,evil does not equal greed or power grabbing.
The true evil are all the people in the background who won't fight back or even speak up. All those 'Greek Chorus'sections, of the common man, stuck between aiding and abetting a sociopath or starve-right! in the 'System' in order to feed their families show more were appalling. Disgusting. Isn't that the lesson of history? The little people going along with closed eyes are what make evil possible.

His book has four pages of praise from American literary critics before the title page.
I wish I had noticed this before I read the book. I usually avoid reading books recommended by professional paragons of virtue.

So I'd give this one a pass. Other authors write as well as Rash without the obscenity of evil and violence smeared across the pages, then causally blaming it all on the "System".

Or buy a Kindle version and save a tree... show less