LONG AGO LAST SUMMER

Moore presents a semiautobiographical collection of essays, short stories, and poetry set in the American South.

The author characterizes this collection as a “sort of mosaic” of his life. Though most of the pieces are set in Moore’s home state of South Carolina, the contents are varied, from an account of the author’s late wife’s battle with cancer to a poem written for Nancy Reagan to a story about someone afraid of lightning. The work opens with the fictious story of a man (based on Moore’s father) who quits his job so he can take up crop-dusting. The author later shares early memories of his life, including being attacked by a rooster and spending his first few years living at his grandparents’ “gas station/house.” In the 1970s, he attended the University of South Carolina; it was there he was stuck with a roommate who spent his days “in his matchbox of a room drinking 16-oz. cans of Busch Bavarian beer while watching a black-and-white TV the size of a cafeteria tray.” One of the standout pieces involves the author hitchhiking to Folly Beach as a teenager—he and his brother survived an encounter with someone who was likely the serial killer Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins. Even though the hitchhiking story is only four pages long, it fits a lot of frightening intrigue into a short space; the reader not only learns who Gaskins was, but gets to see the monster in action, doing things like casually burning a boy with a cigarette. Moore excels at describing such individuals, like a woman who wore a “brown woolen monkish garment, the hood coming to a point pulled up over her stark white hair.” Some tales do not have quite the same staying power—a poem about a dog that sometimes had “Stygian, technicolor diarrhea” is memorable mostly for that nauseating image. Still, Moore’s mosaic conveys much with a sense of humor and a sensitivity to life’s struggles.

A heartfelt, highly personal assortment of lived experiences and fictionalized accounts.