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2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 24 PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSH TEEPE; COURTESY OF EMILY MCDONALD
OVERCOMING THE SOUTHERN CULT OF AUTHENTICITY
Critics almost universally hailed Wiley Cash’s debut novel, A Land More Kind than Home (2012), and an impressive range of literary heavyweights – including Bobbie Ann Mason, Ernest J. Gaines, Clyde Edgerton, and Fred Chappell – trumpeted the novel for its engrossing plot, its masterful use of first-person narration, and its fierce depiction of the people and landscape of Western North Carolina. But I think Cash’s second novel, This Dark Road to Mercy, is a much more satisfying read. A few months ago, I moved to Boston. But I’ve lived in Chapel Hill for the past decade and before that I’d lived in South Carolina since birth. I won’t wax romantic, but I miss the Carolinas, and getting to read and review This Dark Road to Mercy was just the medicine I needed, particularly since the novel is a traveling tale that moves through the parts of the Carolinas I know best.* This Dark Road to Mercy is written from the first-person perspective of three characters: Easter Quillby, Robert Pruitt, and Brady Weller. Easter is a twelveyear-old girl who is struggling, along with her six-year-old sister Ruby, in the foster care system of Gastonia, NC. Their mother has
a review by Zackary Vernon Wiley Cash. This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel. New York: William Morrow, 2014.
In 2014, ZACKARY VERNON finished his PhD in English at UNC Chapel Hill. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Merrimack College. His work on American literature and film has recently been published in scholarly journals such as Studies in the Novel, Journal of Modern Literature, Appalachian Journal, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Read his interview with Ron Rash and Terry Roberts and his Pushcartnominated essay on Allan Gurganus in NCLR 2014. WILEY CASH grew up in Gastonia, NC, and he currently lives in Wilmington. He earned a BA from UNC Asheville, an MA from UNC Greensboro, and a PhD from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. A New York Times bestseller, Cash’s first novel, A Land More Kind than Home (HarperCollins, 2012), received the Southern Independent Bookseller Alliance Book Award for Fiction of the Year and the John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award from the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association, and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and for the American Booksellers’ Association Debut Fiction Prize.
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died of a drug overdose, and their previously negligent father, Wade, a former minor league baseball player for the Gastonia Rangers, emerges from nowhere and tries to reenter his daughters’ lives. Desperate to reconnect with what little family he has left, Wade abducts Easter and Ruby from their foster home and takes them on a search for a place of their own, which all three wayfarers are equally eager to find. Although Wade’s intentions with his daughters are good, the situation is complicated by the fact that he is fleeing the local “hillbilly mafia” from which he has stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars (111). As a result, Wade and his daughters are pursued throughout the novel by the mafia’s henchman, Robert, who wants to collect the money, but who also has a personal vendetta against Wade from their days playing minor league baseball together. Also in pursuit is Brady, the girls’ legal guardian, who is searching for them for both professional and personal reasons. A failed father himself, Brady takes the girls under his wing. His protection of them gains increasing significance and ultimately suggests a reconciliation for his own blundered fatherhood.
In an interview that appeared in NCLR 2013, Cash talks about a similar longing for North Carolina while completing his PhD at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In fact, he says that “several bouts of homesickness” motivated his choice to set A Land More Kind than Home in Western North Carolina, despite the fact that its narrative was inspired in part by a story that took place in Chicago (George Hovis, “The Seen And The Unseen,” 94).