Originally posted at FanLit http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/those-who-went-remain-there-still/

Those Who Went Remain There Still is a short Southern Gothic horror novel by Cherie Priest which I listened to in audio format. The story follows two plotlines told in alternating chapters. One is excerpts from Daniel Boone’s Reflections Upon the Wilderness Road which he wrote while leading a group of trailblazers across Kentucky. Every night, Boone and his men are being stalked, picked off, and eaten by a huge bird-like monster.

The second plotline follows the history of Daniel Boone’s descendants in the rural Kentucky area where Boone met the monster. They’re an inbred, ignorant and nasty lot that’s been split into two feuding families. A couple of the family members from each side manage to “escape” by running away, eventually acquiring some education, and progressing to a new standard of living. Each is called home years later when the family patriarch dies and leaves a will which must be searched for in a nearby cave. Here the two plotlines converge.

Priest’s story is unsettling from the start when we read the first entry in Daniel Boone’s Reflections Upon the Wilderness Road as he describes his men’s encounters with the bird monster. At first he reports only cursory images of the thing but as the story continues, we get more sensory details and it gets more frightening. At the end we meet the monster face to face and by this point Priest has complete control over our mental imagery so that everything it does, even the smallest bird-like movement of its head, is disturbing. When Boone’s narrative is over, we assume we’re done with monsters, but no, it only gets more horrifying.

It’s not just the monster that’s unsettling. The two families who descended from Daniel Boone could populate the cast of Deliverance. They are vividly portrayed and utterly odious. Besides Daniel Boone, who we only know through his journal entries and later as a ghost, the only characters who are remotely likable are the two who left Kentucky and even they’re hard to fully endorse since they abandoned their families and wouldn’t have come back if it hadn’t been for the will.

Those Who Went Remain There Still was my first exposure to Cherie Priest’s work and I was impressed. Her writing is vivid, well-paced, and she has a great ear. She has spent most of her life in the Southeast and attended college and graduate school in Tennessee, which probably explains her authentic voice.

Those Who Went Remain There Still is an excellent example of Southern Gothic. I highly recommend the audio version produced by Audible Frontiers and read by Marc Vietor and Eric Michael Summerer. The narrators are both spot-on with their Southern Gothic voices and this is one of those cases where I felt that the audio version might be even better than print. It’s a brilliant performance. You can listen to a sample at Amazon or Audible. ( )

Excellent! Very creepy and tense, and the two narratives and 3 viewpoint characters wove together beautifully. ( )

Those Who Went Remain There Still
Cherie Priest
Subterranean Press 2008
ISBN 978-1-59606-179-8
Fantasy/Horror/Historical Fiction
Signed, numbered edition (113/200)
Cover art by Mark Geyer
Hardcover
170 pages

“Those Who Went Remain There Still” is an Americana folk tale with a macabre and horrifying spin. It is, in essence, a tale of monsters, both real and imagined, human and… other, with elements of folklore, family history, and a feud that spans over ten decades. But it is much more. Bringing together components of family, local and national history, Priest has a knack for getting close to the characters and places that she creates. What’s more, she has the remarkable ability to make you feel close to them as well. In doing so she weaves a tightly knit tale with wonderful characters that live off the page.

The story shifts between the perspectives of one of the U.S.’s most enigmatic real-life trailblazers, Daniel Boone to a group of strong frontiersmen that are loosely drawn on the author’s own ancestors.

The year is 1775 and Daniel Boone and his crew of axmen are cutting a trail through the Cumberland Gap of Kentucky. But they’ve disturbed the nest or hunting grounds of something that is hateful, spiteful, smart, and mad as hell at them for trespassing. One night they are attacked by this strange flying creature (larger than a bear it reeks of death and ruin) and a single man goes missing. Every few nights the creature returns and every few nights another man disappears. In a subsequent attack the beast is injured and Boone and a volunteer head off into the dark forest to finish the job. After battling and killing the beast they dump the body into a nearby cave.

One hundred years later the Coys and Manders are summoned back to their home town after the death of the eldest family member. Six men, three Coys and three Manders, are chosen to enter the “Witches’ Pit” a cave where the last will and testament of the deceased patriarch has supposedly been hidden. Choosing three men from each clan the deceased tries to quell the feud posthumously by forcing the two clans to cooperate together to locate the will. What the six chosen men don’t know is that Boone and his axmen did not completely finish the job they started and something wicked, evil, angry and hungry is waiting for them in the depths of the cave.

While horror is not one of my favorite genres and only a very few good stories have held my attention in the past this folk tale was written so beautifully and with such an ear for the historical folklore and myths of the Kentucky mountains that I could not put it down. In a way it reminded me of Orson Scott Card’s “Alvin Maker” stories which I enjoyed immensely but there was something different about “Those Who Went…” Priest show a great deal of pride in her heritage and her characters are believable, earthy, rugged and confident individuals. And, there is magic… or the unknown woven throughout. Perhaps because Priest included fictional representatives of her own family it was made clear to me that this was something she really cared about. Perhaps, more authors should do the same. All in all, this is a fantastic work of speculative fiction. No finer words of praise might be said than, “I’ve become a fan!”

A word about the included Chapbook – The small Chapbook, “Those Who Went Remain There Still (How it Really Went Down.)” which was included with the purchase of the signed version of the hardcover of the same name, is a short essay concerning the author’s use of verbal family history woven into American history and the creative imagination used to write this wonderful piece of (too) short fiction. Using verbal family tales as a baseline the author mixes components of the fictitious life of Daniel Boone with the fear of darkness and deep caverns, a century’s old family feud, the possible cooperation of six very different men, and creatures not quite of this earth. An interesting and informative addition to the text.

4 1/2 out of 5 stars

The Alternative
Southeast Wisconsin ( )

An interesting story of two feuding related families in the South and the deceased patriarch's way of uniting them. By leaving his will in a cave on the property. Three people from each side of the family are chosen and the only way they can survive the cave is to work together (which leaves a bad taste in the mouth of most). Oh, did I mention something nasty lurks in the cave?

As an added bonus, if you get the limited hardcover edition, you also get a chapbook that tells the story behind the story. Which I did, because I love knowing the origins of writers' ideas. ( )

The premise: When the patriarch of a small town in Kentucky passes away, two feuding families (the Coys and the Manders) must unite to find the old man's will, which he had hidden in a cave that's got SOMETHING seriously wrong in it. And that something will do everything it can to kill these men, if the men don't kill each other first.

My Rating

Worth the Cash: though that's a tricky rating: I bought the limited edition and therefore paid more for it than you would if you just ordered the regular hardcover through Amazon, but it's worth whatever you pay for it, especially if you're a fan of Priest's work. I love how she takes American folk tales and mythology and works them into horror stories that are both intelligently written and beautifully told. And, of course, keep you turning the pages. Priest remains one of my must-read authors, and she's one of the few I'll happily recommend to anyone I know who's interested in horror or urban fantasy or any mix thereof. Not that her latest work could be categorized as UF, but I'm saying, there's a range in the genres she writes, and this one is definitely on the horror side. But no matter what she does, it's top-notch, and I'm glad I've got this book in my collection. Also, I love the eerie title, and it fits really, really, frighteningly well with the people in the story. It's so appropriately Southern.

The full review, which DOES NOT contain spoilers and also includes cover art commentary, may be found in my LJ. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome.

REVIEW: Cherie Priest's THOSE WHO WENT REMAIN THERE STILL

Happy Reading! ( )