Review: Rash’s ‘Burning Bright’ is intense, pure

Another review of one of Burning Bright by Ron Rash, one of my favorite Western North Carolina writers. Rash will be reading from his new book, which is a collection of short stories, at Malaprop’s on March 19.

This is from a review that appeared in the Seatlle Post-Intelligencer:

Though seemingly linked only by geography, the stories of Burning Brighttwist inextricably into a cohesive unit, bound by the undefinable, yet undeniable, spirit of that landscape. If a common thread runs through each story, it is that of a threat. Poverty, the sort where the bank taking “the truck and most of the livestock” makes a couple better off than the neighbors, infests the Depression-era Appalachia which houses the first story, aptly named “Hard Times.” Several of the stories reveal the corrosive modern threat of methamphetamine addiction. A Civil War wife faces threat from a former neighbor turned Confederate soldier in “Lincolnites.” Many characters confront more nebulous dangers. The protagonist of “The Corpse Bird” is caught by the collision of the naturalistic world of his youth and the materialistic, scientific world of his education and neighbors.

In the hands of a lesser writer, these tales would be melodramatic or overwhelming to the point of becoming unreadable. However, Rash delicately balances and layers the nuances of madness and hope to craft, instead, stories that grab the reader and drag him into a deep, rich, painful and oddly redemptive world.

…

Burning Bright reminds us of the value and depth of pain. It is a novel that scorns the slick and comfortable. Things with rough edges grip and hold, the polished is a slippery, suspect thing. Burning Bright can be summed up in one character’s musings regarding music. “I turn to Bobo and Hal and play the opening chords of Gary Stewart’s ‘Roarin’ and they fall in. Stewart was one of this country’s neglected geniuses, once dubbed honky-tonk’s ‘white trash ambassador from hell’ by one of the few critics who bothered listening to him. His music is two centuries’ worth of pent-up Appalachian soul, too intense and pure for Nashville, though they tried their best to pith his brain with cocaine, put a cowboy hat on his head, and make him into another talentless music-city hack.” Ron Rash is no hack, and Burning Bright does indeed burn “intense and pure.”