A TWILIGHT REEL

Cody spins linked tales of mountain-town life in this collection.

It’s 1999, and in the small Appalachian town of Runion, North Carolina, the old and the new brush up against each other in uncomfortable ways. In “The Wine of Astonishment,” a minister sets out on a winter night to deliver some news to the estranged sister of one of his parishioners. On his way up the mountain, however, he picks up a hitchhiker, who, at the point of the knife, redirects the course of the minister’s evening. In “Overwinter,” a college professor gets snowed in at home on the same day his wife was planning to leave him for a new man. He can’t deal directly with his collapsing marriage, however, because he must try to find a way to keep the senile woman next door alive when the power goes off. A girl and her great-grandmother sit on their porch in “Conversion,” watching men turn the old church next door into a mosque; it isn’t long before some locals in pickup trucks come to start trouble with the new neighbors, and the woman and girl are eyewitnesses. In these 12 tales, which span the 12 months of the year, Cody documents the cycle of death and life in a colorful American town. The author’s prose is precise and frequently surprising, alternating between moments of peril and humor. “When Dr. Brian Anderson used up his last breath on a moderately difficult ascending passage in Gaubert’s Nocturne and Allegro Scherzando and fell over dead…the Department of Music at Runion State University—for the first time in forty-one years—faced the task of finding a new Professor of Flute.” The stories all sing on their own, but it is in the harmonizing of characters and events as they appear in multiple tales that the real joy of the collection is found. From intimate moments of personal crisis to communitywide occasions, such as those found in the rambling “Decoration Day,” Cody effectively captures conflicts of American life at the turn of the last millennium.

A delightful, richly detailed set of stories.