Another powerful book from James Lee Burke. The setting in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana is rendered beautifully. Eighty-five-year-old Aaron Holland Broussard lives the story and tells it well, with descriptions and insights in language that is often both lovely and unsettling. The novel is powered by significant personal (parental) loss in the death of a daughter – a horrible experience suffered by both author and character – and the troubling trauma of a nation coming apart at the seams.
The poisonous energies splitting these seams include racism and white supremacy, an ignorance that is nationwide and best represented out in the world the novel reflects by fools for the Confederate flag and January 6 insurrectionists. The malignant energies of greed disguised as a defense of rights – fools for the 2nd Amendment, which was never intended to be used for gun-lust (a foolish and frightening swirl of gnawing fear and hunger for perceived power) – and of any religion based on exclusionist fervor and not on love of all (all means all, y’all).
All of these power grabs – racism, gun-lust, exclusionary religion – are deep infections in the past (and present) of the United States, and they are represented in the ghostly, spectral character of Eugene Baker, the military monster ultimately responsible for the Marias River Massacre on January 23, 1870. In Every Cloak Rolled in Blood, Baker is the scary representative of the US’s brutal past. The weak-minded – those without purpose or capacity for any thought or love that is unselfish, benevolent – fall under his spell and do his evil bidding. Ignorance is a vacuum into which he thunders. But to stand up to him – with clear and energetic thought, with love, with goodness – is to learn he is finally ineffectual, having no power other than – beyond what – we give him.
Here are some of my favorite general comments about A Twilight Reel, posted either to Amazon or Goodreads by actual readers (i.e., these are not actor reenactments). I’m grateful for and gratified by each of these insightful comments, and thankful for the readers who took time to read and respond.
A Twilight Reel is a short story collection whose specificity of place and time put me in mind of, yes, Joyce and Faulkner, but also Alice Munro and Elena Ferrante — writers whose work is so stamped with the imprint of a region and culture that I feel like I’ve been to those places, and not as a tourist but as a full-fledged member of the community.
. . . And although set in 1999, it is timely enough to call into sharp relief the seemingly unbridgeable divisions we currently live with in American society. And it does this without going anywhere near a soap box. Several books have been recommended to me by conservative friends since 2016 to help me “understand.” None have come close to this book in terms of providing a relatable, believable, fleshed out, functioning world in which these divisions are explored. BIG caveat here: I do not in any way believe that Michael Amos Cody set out to make a political statement. I would hate to saddle such a terrific piece of writing with that kind of intent. The author wants to capture the place and people where he grew up. That’s what he’s done and that’s what makes it so effective.
12 months. 12 stories. Seemingly ordinary people with far from ordinary stories. A touch of Twain, Wilde, and O. Henry woven through a year’s worth of tales from the denizens of the fictional town of Runion, NC. . . . Michael Cody continues the prosaic brilliance displayed in his novel Gabriel’s Songbook that provokes the reader into rapidly turning pages out of pure enjoyment fueled by the anticipation of what is to come with each passing page.
I have finally (late in life) discovered the joy of reading! Twilight Reel was a great read and I felt after finishing each story that I wanted to KNOW MORE about what happens in the life of Cody’s characters! I liked the mention of characters from his novel, Gabriel’s Songbook, which was another very enjoyable read!
A Twilight Reel belongs to a rare, wonderful breed: undeniably “literary” fiction that still reads like a guilty pleasure. These stories would be lauded in an MFA workshop—but you should also give the book to your cousin who hates to read! Much has been said about the book’s refined virtues, and I’ll add some more. But let the reader first know that Cody has so exquisitely described a place, that its particularity becomes a portal to wherever you are; has birthed compelling characters you badly miss when you finish the book; and has crafted narratives that drive the reader through even the most meticulous literary craftsmanship. . . . This is surely a collection of stories for readers interested in understanding contemporary Appalachia. But Cody’s fictional town of Runion, North Carolina is no more restrictive to his vision than Hawthorne’s Salem or even Balzac’s Paris were to them. These stories are, as Paine wrote of Common Sense, “the concern of every [person] to whom nature hath given the power of feeling.”
In A Twilight Reel, Michael Amos Cody creates a mosaic portrait of the fictionalized town of Runion, North Carolina, with each of its twelve short stories corresponding to a month of the year. Cody writes about present-day Appalachia without condescension or contrived positivity, portraying Runion’s surroundings and characters with subtlety and sensitivity. As such, Cody’s imagined community compares favorably with Wendell Berry’s Port William, Kentucky in its depth and reach. As in his earlier novel Gabriel’s Songbook, Cody establishes his own sense of place with a keen eye for detail and a heart as big as all outdoors.
If the nostalgic feeling of your small hometown could somehow be embodied in a book, this is it. This collection of short stories, all set in a small North Carolina town called Runion, is unapologetically realistic if you’ve ever lived in a small southern town full of secrets and intertwined relationships. Cody’s work in this collection boasts the kind of raw southern charm that only Flannery O’Connor can parallel. This collection of stories is worth the buy, but note that it’s impossible to just stop at one story, so be sure that you have an entire afternoon free for reading once you start.
The photograph on this book’s cover perfectly suggests the pleasures that await the reader inside. Each story draws you in inexorably, and you find yourself eagerly anticipating the denouement while also slowing yourself down to savor. . . . You know, the way the best stories do. . . . If i could give this collection six stars, i would.
This collection of short stories takes you back to a place where relationships matter and a sense of home abounds. The stories are beautifully written with rich characters. A must read!
A Twilight Reel reminds us of the connections, both expected and unlikely, that exist among people. Michael Amos Cody carefully quilts together the lives of those living in and passing through small town Appalachia, reminding us that it is often impossible to completely know the secrets, intentions, and stories of those who surround us, even though our lives are intertwined.
This was a very enjoyable read. From a character’s simple appreciation of a beverage to their strong memories which modify their current behaviors, Cody seamlessly marries the internal and external lives of these townsfolk. You enter their world and consciousness as individuals and feel them enter the varied interrelationships of small town life. The reach of the area’s history shows its continuing influence in each chapter, whether from ancestral deeds and misdeeds or from the meaning of the Civil War itself. Highly recommended.
Talk about bringing characters, scenery, hopes, fears, tears, love and desires to life, Michael Cody has a way that allows your imagination to be inside the settings. A fabulous collection of stories that brought an outsider into the life of those in Runion.
Haunting, smart, with an eye of compassion for the assorted folx living in the small but changing small town of Southern Appalachia.
The author’s descriptions in each story are so vivid that the reader feels like she is there. When I was reading “The Wine of Astonishment,” I realized my heart was beating out of my chest. The book has numerous accounts of the residents of a fictional town attempting to deal with a changing world while keeping the traditions of their past that are worth preserving. Sometimes, the traditions and beliefs are so strong that no attempt is made to change, grow, and consider the perspective of another. The book helped me to better understand myself and the Appalachian area in which I was reared.
Many of these snapshots have celebratory elements of life, though, especially of the Appalachian slice. The culture is poignant in these stories. . . . Overall, it’s a really solid collection, and I think the snapshots feel a bit like turning the pages of a family album. I highly recommend sitting down and spending some time on the front porch with these stories. 🙂
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?”
I’m well aware that my 2021 reading adventures can’t begin to rival the adventurous list of many, including friends like Melissa H. or Catherine P. C. from Facebook. Obviously I do a lot of reading for my job, which is as a Professor of English in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University. But relatively few of the books listed below were read for class. The list includes thirty-six titles, which, if my math is correct, comes to an average of three books per month.
The books are listed alphabetically by last name of the author.
I also read my short story collection A Twilight Reel a couple of times in the first quarter of the year, before its publication late in May.
I’m looking forward to the places I’ll go and the people I’ll meet and be in my 2022 readings, some of which are already in progress. Here’s a sneak peek:
I’m a fan of music novels. Christy Alexander Hallberg’s Searching for Jimmy Page is a new favorite. To bring music alive via a silent, two-dimensional space isn’t an easy thing to do, but Hallberg does it well with this story. It’s fast-paced and palpable, and at the same time it’s dreamlike, ethereal. In this, the novel is itself like a Led Zeppelin song—or maybe like an album of previously unreleased Zeppelin tracks.
Luna Kane is a believable and engaging character, coming of age in a recognizable world that is fuller of pain than of joy, fuller of questions than of answers, and yet fuller of mystery than of misery. Hers is a world in which the living and the dead wield equal influence—or at least attempt to do so. It would be a lot for a young woman to navigate alone, but she receives significant support and grounding from Full River Connie and London Peter, both vivid characters.
Searching for Jimmy Page is a rewarding reading experience. I began it as a “car read,” a world I would enter when waiting here or there (a drive-thru, for example), but by the time Luna left Full River on the bus, I took the book from the car and was all in for the ride to the end.
So, I thought I’d look 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).
The first of the twelve stories in A Twilight Reel–the January story–is “The Wine of Astonishment.” Here’s Pisgah Press’s one-sentence description of the course: “In the opening tale, a local preacher is taken captive by a fallen predecessor and struggles to escape before his own sins bring him down as well.”
The opening lines of “The Wine of Astonishment”
Here are two comments specifically focused on “Wine”:
With “The Wine of Astonishment,” this anthology kicks off with an Edgar Allan Poe flavored story of temptation and desperation involving the preacher of a community church, a mystery woman, and a madman. The ending does not disappoint.
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 title of the story comes from Psalm 60, the third verse of which reads, “Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou hast made us to drink the wine of astonishment” (KJV). I’m not sure at what point this phrase grabbed me, but grab me it did. It seems to work perfectly for the story.
As for the story, longtime friend Tom DuVall experienced a captivity event like this one night when we were in high school and he was coming from Marshall to Walnut to spend the night at my house. Having known Tom for years now, I sometimes wonder if what he said happened really happened. I think it did, but it really doesn’t matter. The story came regardless.
If asked about an influence for the story, I’d have to say I owe the journey into the nighttime wilderness and the encounter with this creepy character to a favorite writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), and his classic short story from the 1830s, “Young Goodman Brown.”
I’m relatively new to memoir, but I can hardly imagine liking one much better than I like Livingston’s Ghostbread. It’s beautifully written, beginning to end. The short sections (chapters?) seem a poetic hybrid of confessional lyric and flash creative nonfiction. These provided me with intense emotional experiences of both the highs and lows of family and poverty, of growing up amid the tensions of these, of searching for identity and belonging.
Almost everything detailed here is completely outside my experience. I grew up with not only a mother but also a father and a brother in Protestant southern Appalachia, in a lower middle class family (with lots of extensions) in the same house in which my mother grew up. And yet, I felt–I feel–an intense resonance with Ghostbread, which, first, suggests that at its core the memoir tells a deeply human story and, second, attests to the richness and power of Livingston’s writing.
Songbirds and Stray Dogs is a novel of great characters. We’re immediately on the side of Jolene. We know that her poorly chosen lover and her shallowly religious aunt are going to reject her long before she knows, and yet we hope and stick with her. And she proves herself worth sticking with from beginning to end.
We’re immediately on the side of Chuck as well, who shows up in the second section of the novel. He’s in over his head in all kinds of ways–his past, his family, etc. But in spite of his past and present troubles with Jackson and his henchmen, he’s a good man–a very well drawn character. He’s subject to more than his share of violence, at the hands of wicked men and lost or near-lost women.
Surrounding these two–from the opening pages to the closing–are the good, the bad, and the ugly: the people of Beaufort, Aunt Rachel, lawyer Webb, Ruby, Jackson, Roy, that really big guy, Joe, the good police sergeant, the bad deputy, Dottie, Cora, Lulu, Cash, and others.
Meagan Lucas’s Songbirds and Stray Dogs tells an energetic and affecting story, from its opening secret to its final conflagration.
A poem for my father, Plumer Jean Cody (May 19, 1931 – November 7, 1996), who lay down in his soldier’s grave a quarter century ago.
The Veteran’s Cemetery, Early November
Early November, when his autumn work was done, he left us standing stupid and staring at the blue-brown of the coming Appalachian winter.
He left behind the shrinking garden, harvested, the expanding lawn, mowed its final time. He left behind the handy man who could fix anything,
took leave of the newly retired postal worker who never went postal, and abandoned his role as little patriarch, begetter of two sons.
He abdicated head-of-household status, in the house that was never his, left the loved wife of forty-two years and her overbearing weakness—
That night he shed this life like Wednesday’s dirty clothes and would have been surprised by all who braved early snows to watch him lie down in a proud soldier’s grave.
“Conversion” – After Donald Roy, the pastor of the Lonesome Mountain American Christian Church, loses the church building to the bank and runs off with the congregation’s remaining money and the wife of one of its members, the Islamic Community of Western North Carolina takes over the building and converts it to a mosque.
9/11 Memorial & Museum, visited in May 2018
A Cody among those lost on 9/11
Pano of one “footprint” at 9/11 Memorial & Museum (2018)
On that Tuesday twenty years ago, I was a couple of weeks into my first year of teaching at East Tennessee State University. I had two ENGL 1010 (freshman composition) classes that morning, one at 9:45 and another at 11:15. I arrived on campus early and closed myself in my office to do last-minute prep.
The earlier class was a strange one in which hardly anybody ever talked–not to me (unless called upon), not even to each other. Although cell phones weren’t quite as ubiquitous as they are now, I’m guessing that at least a few of these students were aware of what was underway in New York and DC. Nobody said a word.
I finished that first class by 11:05 and returned to my office for a few minutes, where I sat with my door closed and readied myself for the next class.
As I walked out of the office and down the hall to meet my 11:15 folks, thankfully a lively bunch so different from the group just before, I remember noticing a strange quietness and hearing snatches of conversations that struck me as odd. I walked into that talkative 11:15 class, where the students were in an uproar about what had happened that morning.
In other words, both towers had been hit and had fallen before I knew anything about it.
My students were telling me what had happened when my department chair, Dr. Judy Slagle, knocked on the door and said ETSU was closing. I let the students go, drove to Southside Elementary and picked up Raleigh, who was in 4th grade, and drove to our rented house on Franklin Street. The rest of the day was spent glued to the television.
As I think about it now, I realize that the change in the world–White “Christian” America’s sudden awareness of its vulnerability–is what made my story “Conversion” possible. As the world voiced its outrage against the devastation New York and DC (and Pennsylvania) experienced that morning, I felt a hope that violence and terrorism might draw the world’s humans together regardless of race, religion, nationality, and so on, but that hope was a pretty bubble that lasted only a moment. What was momentarily a colorblind humanity united against terrorists of any color or stripe unfortunately dissolved into the USA’s lengthy “War on Terror,” a war of mostly White against Black and Brown people, which has been too much like waging war on the wind or on ghosts, ultimately adding legions of ghosts to those of 9/11.
To be honest, I would rather have not been able to write “Conversion.” But it is written. If interested, you can read it at Still: The Journal or in my book A Twilight Reel: Stories.
