This inventive, often-hilarious, and sometimes-heartbreaking collection of stories explores pivotal moments and events in the lives of a range of villains from literature and mythology–among them, Captain James Hook of Peter Pan, Claudius of Hamlet, and Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca. The stories consider the full emotional and motivational scope of these characters, often illuminating the personal histories and tragedies that may have engendered their villainy, or, with time, sparked a desire to turn over a new leaf. The result is a nuanced and emotionally engaging immersion in the at-times-fantastical, yet eerily plausible, worlds of the stories. (The book is the winner of the 2020 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. This press regularly publishes fine collections of short stories and poetry.)

The following review is by Chris McGinley, an incredibly talented writer and the author of Coal Black: Stories, which I highly recommended in a Small Press Picks review. It’s an honor to feature Chris’s insights on Karen Salyer McElmurray’s captivating book.  –Beth Castrodale, editor of Small Press Picks

There’s an excellent essay called “Hand Me Down” in Karen Salyer McElmurray’s new book, Voice Lessons.  In it, the author recalls a dress her grandmother once made, now old and nearly threadbare. The collar is frayed, McElmurray notes, and the old-time pattern is wildly inappropriate for the scholarly event she attends in it.  She says of her seamstress granny:

The passage evokes one of the central themes in McElmurray’s excellent “memoir in essays,” some published earlier but now collected in one mesmerizing book. Though the writing spans different periods in the author’s life and travels, it seems inevitably to return to this idea of ancestors, to the resourceful hill women who helped shape the author’s spiritual and artistic core, the women who raised her, grew her in fact, into the woman she eventually became. Throughout the book McElmurray pays tribute to these strong women, commonly the source material for her novels and poetry, and for her essays and her muse generally.  In fact, the depiction of these women—mothers, daughters, aunts, and grannies—are achingly beautiful, especially since McElmurray never devolves into maudlin sentiment, never renders a portrait flatly or nostalgically. Instead, the book foregrounds the complicated relationships between the scholar/artist McElmurray–a writer, educator, and aesthetician–and the mountain women who have forever warned her not to “get above her raisin’.”

Described as “prose snapshots,” each of the stories in this evocative, wide-ranging collection captures significant or telling moments, encounters, or observations in 50 words or fewer. Together, they add up to something far greater than the sum of their parts, creating a rich, layered portrait of the human experience.

In this inventive and affecting novel, the barriers between the real world and the worlds of the imagination, magic, and folklore become porous at best and sometimes dissolve altogether. As disorienting as these breaks with reality are for the couple at the center of the story, Adrian Dussett and Ben Hughes, they ultimately prove revelatory, pushing Adrian and Ben to confront personal difficulties that have troubled them for years and created a divide in their relationship.

With page-turner plots that take us to dark places, on both sides of the law, Chris McGinley’s rural-noir story collection, Coal Black, is a deeply satisfying read. What makes the book even more captivating is how deeply rooted each story is in the book’s setting: the hills of eastern Kentucky, a place of both natural beauty and human struggle, and to certain of McGinley’s characters, a place where figures from local folklore and legends can sometimes feel just as real–and just as threatening–as a gun-toting thief or drug dealer.

In many coming-of-age novels, parents are absent, literally or figuratively. But one of the many distinctions of Elizabeth Earley’s dazzling and incisive new novel, Like Wings, Your Hands, is the interconnectedness of the two central characters: fourteen-year-old Marko and his mother, Kalina. Despite this close connection, Kalina remains a mystery to Marko, a frustration that leads him to make transformative discoveries about her, himself, and a grandfather he’s never met.