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 sometimes feel just as real–and just as threatening–as a gun-toting thief or drug dealer.
This setting factors into both the motivations of the criminals who stalk the hills, and the types of crimes they commit. With local mines no longer offering steady jobs, or any jobs at all, certain citizens have turned to illegal activities just to get by, or to maintain the supply of opioids to which they’ve become addicted. These activities include a variety of hardscrabble crimes, such as petty theft, poaching wildlife on neighbors’ land, and selling bark that’s been stripped from slippery elms: a prized ingredient in herbal remedies. (Opioids, by the way, are a factor in many of the stories, having become a way to dull the hopelessness brought on by the lack of jobs or by the failing health of loved ones who are suffering from black lung or from cancer brought on by mining-related pollution.)
When the two central characters in “And They Shall Take up Serpents,” James and Harlan, set out to steal tools from a strip-mining site, they don’t have many scruples about the theft. After developing mining-related illnesses, both of the young men’s fathers were overcome with medical bills, and in time, James’s dad paid the ultimate price.
“Tell you what,” James tells Harlan. “The day my dad died, I declared war on the coal company. On all coal companies, I mean. … Fuck this place. Fuck coal.”
James and Harlan plan to put the money they’ll get for the tools toward the rent and medical bills of their surviving parents and, in Harlan’s case, toward keeping up his supply of OxyContin. Although Harlan entertains the idea of leaving town, he quickly dismisses it, echoing the connections that many other characters in Coal Black feel to the place they’ve long called home, for good or ill: “Hill folks are like fish out of water anywhere else,” Harlan says. “It’s crazy, but I don’t think I could make it outside these hills.”
After he and James consider the possibility of being arrested, James mentions a darker threat: a haint that’s said to watch over the remote mining site, now and then attacking workers, “because of what they’re doing to the mountain.” Harlan dismisses this bit of local legend, until he and James have some unsettling experiences of their own at the site. Soon, things get far more disturbing, and dangerous.
In this and other stories in Coal Black, McGinley handles the supernatural elements deftly and chillingly, with otherworldly beings remaining mostly in the shadows of characters’ imaginations, until they become briefly–and startlingly–real.
In “A Queen’s Burial,” a female bobcat (known as a queen) represents another kind of mystery. The story’s central character, Jefferson Comer, has long been plagued by two neighbors who’ve been poaching wildlife on his land, among other crimes. When Jefferson discovers a dead, pregnant queen in a trap they’d set on his property, he’s heartbroken, and he resolves to give her a proper burial high in the hills, near the grave of the grandmother who raised him.
He remembers the only other time he’d seen a queen, while hunting with his grandma, who’d urged their retreat from the bobcat. “It’s a creature different than the others in these hills,” she said. “Greater than them. And like I said, you don’t want to tempt fate. That creature can be vengeful.”
But tempting fate is just what the two poachers, brothers Nat and Melvin, do. Suspicious about what Jefferson has been up to with his shovel, they become convinced that he’s buried some type of treasure up in the hills. This leads them to take Jefferson by force and make him start digging at the site of the queen’s grave. From here, things take an unexpected turn for Nat and Melvin, and the story delivers a satisfying dose of revenge, for both Jefferson and the bobcat. But that’s not quite the end of the tale, or of the mystery that the queen embodies.
Two outstanding stories in Coal Black, “With Hair Blacker Than Coal” and “River of Nine Dragons,” are told from the side of the law–in particular, from the point of view of Sheriff Curley Knott, an expert tracker who put that skill to use during his service in Vietnam, the memories of which haunt him throughout both tales. In “With Hair Blacker Than Coal,” Curley gets on the trail of two illegal hunters and finds himself confronting a danger that goes far beyond them, a danger connected to a legend about a “wild-looking girl who walked with bobcats” and who seems to do quite a bit of hunting, and killing, herself.
In “River of Nine Dragons,” Curley goes after a man who’d shot one of the local refugees from South Vietnam. The refugee had been trying to stop the man from stealing his ginseng, the main source of income for the refugee and his family. As Curley moves forward with his mission, his memories of Vietnam rise ever closer to the surface, partly because the refugee resembles a Viet Cong soldier he’d killed during the war, partly because Curley has to follow the thief across a swollen stream that reminds him of one of the powerful rivers of the Mekong.
As the story shifts between Curley’s hunt for the ginseng thief and his memories of tracking Viet Cong soldiers who’d stolen two M-16s, the distinctions between the present and the past begin to blur for him. And we come to see the deep connections that he has made between the Mekong and his experiences in Kentucky. In one flashback to Vietnam, Curley and a comrade, Brody, raid a grass hut, demanding that the elderly couple inside tell them where the M-16s are. When the couple indicate that they don’t know anything, Brody hits the husband with the butt of his rifle and throws the wife to the ground. Curley observes:
The connections that Curley makes between Kentucky and Vietnam continue up to the story’s conclusion, and McGinley’s writing about them is unfailingly moving and beautiful. As is the case with every other story in this haunting, hard-to-put down collection, a sense of place resonates through nearly every passage.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":▪ Crime fiction, especially rural noir
▪ Fiction with a strong sense of place
▪ Fiction with elements of folklore or the supernatural
