Buddhism. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. Coyotes. Ghosts who haunt a cove with a history of disaster and violence. Fractured lives undergoing repair.
These are just some of the ideas and themes bumping together in Dale Neal’s The Appalachian Book of the Dead.
In this novel, Neal takes his readers to Yonah, North Carolina, near Asheville, a place of abandoned farms and deep woods. The story opens when two escaped convicts, Jimmy Bray and Angel Garcia Jones, murder an old man at a filling station for his car, drive into the mountains, deliberately run over a state trooper—he dies later that night from his wounds—then wreck the car. Bray is quickly recaptured, but Angel manages to escape into the woods. Though he is believed dead after a long search by law enforcement, Angel’s body is never found, and his presence haunts these hills.
Cal and Joy McAlister are recent transplants from Chicago who have bought a home near Yonah. Cal is a recovering alcoholic, a retired commodities trader, and a hard-nosed man who daily reads The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and who isn’t particularly happy to be living in the Smoky Mountains. Joy, a physical therapist turned potter, is hoping the move, which was her idea, will bring some peace and greater love to their marriage.
Near their home is a derelict camp for girls, now crumbling away from neglect. The former caretaker for the camp, Doyle Smathers, becomes a part-time handyman for the McAlisters while at the same time keeping an eye on the camp and on Ainsley Morse, whose grandmother owns the camp. Ainsley has returned to this favorite place of her childhood to live in yurt while she detoxes from her drug usage and practices yoga and Buddhism.
Though Doyle is a repository of the ghosts and violent history of Yonah, and though Angel haunts the woods, the real ghosts are those who inhabit each of these characters. Ainsley mourns her lost lover and friend, Bernie. Joy, who met Cal as his physical therapist, spent years nursing her sickly mother. Doyle still feels the presence of his wife, electrocuted in a freak accident during a storm. Cal has left in his arrogant, swashbuckling wake a string of broken marriages and a neglected son, Galen, dead of a drug overdose.
When a savage thunderstorm destroys Ainsley’s yurt, Joy invites her to move into the McAlister’s home until the tent can be repaired. While there, her relationship with both Joy and Cal deepens and changes. Here is the point where the characters cease their backward travels into the past, and begin to connect more with their present lives.
To say more would spoil the ending of this story.
The Appalachian Book of the Dead has much to recommend it. The quality of the writing, the complexity of the characters, and the different perspectives keep the reader engrossed in this story. Here, for example, is Cal climbing a mountain near his house, winded and in some pain from the uphill struggle:
“Cal couldn’t be sure whether these hills were harder on his knees or his heart. The steep grade played havoc with his left knee, as he hobbled ever upwards. Putting his pacemaker through its electrical paces, beyond the steady throb of blood in his chest and ears, sometimes he thought he heard a metallic squeak when his weight rode through the arc of the titanium joint in his right knee.
“You are a spirit bearing the weight of a dead body.
“He had read that in Marcus Aurelius the other day, highlighted it with his yellow marker. He’d closed the book, then closed his eyes. “I have what is my own,” he said for his own sake, not for the universe too busy to listen.”
The interactions of Cal, Joy, Ainsley, and Doyle offer us insights into their personalities, but also into the character of the observer. In the case of Ainsley, for instance, Doyle sees her primarily as the little girl who once came to camp, the granddaughter of his wealthy employer. Joy takes Ainsley under her wing and mothers her like the daughter she never had. Cal looks at her first as a freak — Ainsley appears wearing dreadlocks and then in an act of cleansing shaves her head—but soon becomes sexually attracted to this girl young enough to be his daughter.
One final observation: with the possible exception of John Wu, a physics teacher by day and a director of a Buddhist center in the evenings—here Ainsley first begins her real practice of meditation—the males in The Appalachian Book of the Dead are nearly all losers. Bernie, Ainsley’s lover, is more boy than man. Doyle can be kind, but can also be conniving. Galen dies from his love affair with a needle. Despite his affinity for Marcus Aurelius and stoicism, Cal is impatient, often cruel to other people, and likes winning too much to be a real stoic. And Jimmy Bray and Angel are vicious killers.
Near the end of the story, Joy meets a young woman, a counselor in recovery, at the revived girls’ camp.
“It’s the best place. I’ve really cleaned up my act, gotten my life together. I can tell how powerful a place this really is. Finding recovery and healing with other women.”
“No males around. Do you ever miss boys in a place like this?” Joy wondered.
“Not really. It lets you find yourself,” the counselor said.
A fine novel. Just a little hard on the menfolk.