More praise for Rash and his new book, ‘Serena’

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Ron Rash is getting a ton of love for his haunting new novel, Serena.

From the New York Times:

Mr. Rash creates an awestruck Greek chorus of Carolina highlanders to marvel at a tall, brisk businesswoman who seems to have stepped out of Ayn Rand’s imagination. Among this novel’s many wonders are Mr. Rash’s fine ear for idiomatic, laconic talk and the startling contrast he creates between Serena and her new neighbors. The local lay preacher sees her as an omen. “It’s in the Revelations,” he insists. “Says the whore of Babylon will come forth in the last days wearing pants.” When Serena makes herself even more frightening by acquiring a pet eagle to do her bidding, one local sage remarks, “I’d no more strut up and tangle with that eagle than I’d tangle with the one what can tame such a critter.”

Serena has clear ambitions: to log the landscape bare, keep Pemberton land from being made part of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and move on to Brazil and its mahogany forests. Her inability to sleep well is not this book’s only intimation of Lady Macbeth. In a novel punctuated by monstrous logging accidents, described with a minimalism that reflects the workers’ terrible resignation, she schemes and thrives. But in her quiet, impoverished way Rachel Harmon is also thriving. More ominously for the Pemberton marriage, so is her illegitimate baby.9.