Here in the early days of the year, I’ve looked through the great reviews that readers have posted to Amazon and/or Goodreads and post some items with my sincere thanks for reading and for taking the time to review (and rate).

One more on “The Wine of Astonishment”: “When I was reading ‘The Wine of Astonishment,’ I realized my heart was beating out of my chest.” See my earlier post on reviews about this story.

“The Loves of Misty Sprinkle”: “‘The Loves of Misty Sprinkle’ remind[s] us of all those things—small and large alike—that we hold close.”

“Decoration Day” & “Grist for the Mill” & “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel”: “. . . the opus ‘Decoration Day,’ where past and present intertwine and haunt each other, center[s] on that most fitting of set pieces, the Memorial Day gathering in the graveyard that, for some reason, we’re big fans of in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina.”

“Cody has a particular gift for contrapuntal assemblage of disparate elements—people, places, eras. In the superb novella at the center of the book, ‘Decoration Day,’ Cody moves among Civil War re-enactors at a Park Service ceremony, a simultaneous church-sponsored cemetery observance, and the Civil War events that inspired the contemporary events—in particular, the ghastly Shelton Laurel Massacre. In bringing together so many characters and perspectives, Cody dramatizes his character’s observation that ‘these mountains were a mess of allegiances,’ and begins to explain the *how* and *why* of that messiness.

“Cody also has this surprisingly great sense of horror and tension. I didn’t expect to read things that gave me a deep sense of unease and the occasional hair-rise on the arms, but I think Cody gives us a really good sense of the fear that comes from both emotional and physical bits of ourselves. I’d say the most notable stories with this kind of tension is the latter half of cold sweat in ‘The Wine of Astonishment,” the undercurrents of violence in ‘A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel,’ and the realistic boiling-over of ‘Grist for the Mill.'”

“My favorites stories in the collection are ‘Grist for the Mill,’ where the oppressive heat of August simmers and finally boils over on a Runion street in a burst of violence and breaking taboos; ‘A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel,’ the savagery of which viscerally captures the fear of AIDS in Appalachia that I remember from the 90s, tempered here by a transcendent moment of music and defiance. . . .”

“A Poster of Marilyn Monroe”: “And what short story compilation would be complete without a tale where Marilyn Monroe is a central figure?”