Tony Earley

This was a very enjoyable collection of short stories. I actually found this book by chance in a Little Free Library. I'd never heard of the author before, but I just started glancing at the title story out of curiosity. Before I knew it, I'd finished reading the whole book.

The real hook for me was that the first story, "Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands", was set in familiar places along the shore of North Carolina. I related easily to the couple traveling from the southern shores of show more that state to the Outer Banks. I also remember quite a drive through heavy fog on the ocean-side highway. The memories this story brought me carried me through this story ..and then the entire book.

Every story was completely different, each with its own quirky characters. One character, Fieldin Kohler, in the story "The Cryptozoologist" was described like this..."an emaciated praying mantis of a man who stuffed the legs of his paint-spattered chinos into knee-high fringed moccasins." You want to learn more about this character, right? He was a music teacher.

There are lines throughout that will make you laugh out loud. The last story, sort of a fantasy novella was called "Jack and the Mad Dog". One of its characters was Tom Dooley. A line from this story was..."Tom Dooley hung down his head." Yeah. Right. Haha!

Another few lines that cracked me up were these..."The next morning, she took to town the credit card that her father had given her to use in case of emergency and purchased a chain saw (Later when her father received the bill, he canceled the card.)"

Descriptions of everything from the changing settings to the personalities of the characters were very detailed and colorful. This was quite a delightful reading experience. The stories were intertwined, sometimes with just the name of a place; at other times, with some of the same characters! It was interesting to me as well to to find Jewish characters popping up out of nowhere. This was rural North Carolina!

Oh, my! Do give me more books by this author to read! show less

There is a sweetness to the story of ten year old Jim Glass. In the prologue readers learn Jim was born a week after his father passed of a heart attack while working in the fields. Even though he never knew his father, young Jim is not without male guidance as he is surrounded by three protective uncles. His mother's brothers keep an eye on Jim as well as their too-young-to-be-a-widow sister, Cissy.
Earley colors Jim the Boy's characters with real life angst and everything that goes with show more it. For Jim it's immature prejudices and naive hubris amidst competition and companionship with classmates. Growing up in depression era North Carolina, Jim assumes that his house in town is better than those of the mountain boys yet learns differently when he visits a friend with polio. Meanwhile, his mother Cissy struggle to do what is right by Jim. In her heart she wants to remain faithful to a man dead ten years despite needing to give Jim a true father from which she feels he should learn life's harder lessons.
One of my favorite parts of the story was when the uncles wake Jim in the middle of the night to witness electricity coming to their little town. While light bulbs chased away the shadows. At first Jim was excited but then he felt the change made the world a little darker; an interesting perception for a boy so young. show less

Darryl and Cheryl were married in a civil ceremony in South Carolina because the idea of their families mixing at a formal wedding was simply too painful to contemplate.

This is a wonderfully crafted collection by Tony Earley. Set in North Carolina and various parts of the Southern Appalachia, it is a diverse, witty and compelling collection. Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands is the first story and concerns a couple who have just had an unsettling visit with their college-age daughter show more and who then venture further afield for a brief getaway in the Outer Banks, as the fault lines in their marriage become increasingly hard to ignore, while the titular story follows Plutina, as she marries and moves away from home for the first time and up to an isolated mountain farm in 1932, with her equally young husband, Charlie.

Each story moves in unexpected directions that make perfect sense. From The Cryptozoologist, where a woman reflects on her marriage to an older artist, while the FBI hunts the surrounding area for a wanted murderer, to Just Married, where Early ties together three seemingly unrelated stories, each tale reflects on relationships, from the tentative to the long-lasting. The final, longer story is different, being a meta-fairy tale in which a local folktale character, Jack, confronts his own history as well as his disappearance from local knowledge, met along the way by Tom Dooley, of the ballad, and some of the people Jack has wronged.

And as a child of the mountains his aversion to blank horizons was inbred and inalienable. Jack thought, How bleak a vista viewed from the doldrums of a squandered life! Then he spat disgustedly because, as a plot man, he distrusted metaphor.

This is the first book I have read by Tony Earley, but it won't be the last. His stories are deeply rooted in the mountains of Appalachia and the South and remind me of Ron Rash and Tim Gautreaux. show less

I wanted to read this book after reading Earley’s more recent collection, Mr. Tall. His writing has a rootsy feel, embedded in rural landscapes and rural people, put through the kinds of situations and reflections that are stripped down to essentials.

Earley’s writing is regional — this collection is mainly set in rural North Carolina. It has a kind of deep seclusion to it, both in time and space, that makes such places as Charlotte, Atlanta, or Richmond seem like other worlds to the show more characters here. That seclusion serves to focus the lives of his characters on the here and now.

The title story zeroes in on the lives of an aging couple, Vernon and Peggy. Life never becomes what each of them separately wants it to be, and, for that matter, they never successfully and fully share their versions of what they want life to be. But they fell in love shared a life together, and apart in their own thoughts. That they live in “paradise” is both ironic and true at the same time, the same way they both share a life and live inevitably separate lives.

Another story that stuck with me was “Lord Randall”, which borders on the kind of surrealism that was more common in Mr. Tall. The strangely named Lord Randall lives with his parents, whose lives center on a trout pond in the mountains. They strive, although only in a very quirky way, to make a tourist attraction of the pond, with a kind of unaccountable faith that things will work out. It’s as if it doesn’t really matter that the world won’t actually flock to their pond — it’s the perfect medium for their natural and free quirkiness.

There’s a lot here, more portraits than plots. So if you’re in the mood for entertaining reflection, it’s a good place to stop. show less