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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
APPALACHIA ALIVE AND WELL a review by Michael J. Beilfuss Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon, editors. Summoning the Dead: Essays on Ron Rash. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018.
MICHAEL J. BEILFUSS is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. He earned a PhD from Texas A&M University. His essay “Rootedness and Mobility: Southern Sacrifice Zones in Ron Rash’s Serena” was published in the Mississippi Quarterly in 2015. ZACKARY VERNON received his PhD in English from UNC Chapel Hill in 2014. Vernon is Assistant Professor of English at Appalachian State University. He was the first recipient of NCLR’s Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize, and his essay was published in NCLR 2016. He has published other essays and several interviews in NCLR. RANDALL WILHELM earned a BFA from Winthrop University, an MA from Clemson University, and PhD from the University of Tennessee. He is Assistant Professor at Anderson University in Anderson, SC. He is the editor of The Ron Rash Reader (University of South Carolina Press, 2014; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017). Read his essay “Expressive Interplay through Pictures and Words: The Art and Design in the North Carolina Literary Review” in NCLR 2017.
Readers of NCLR need no introduction to Ron Rash. As a beloved North Carolina poet, short story writer, and novelist, his name and works often appear in this journal. He first garnered serious attention sometime after the publication of his third collection of poetry, Raising the Dead (2002), and subsequently his first novel, One Foot in Eden (2002), which expands on the characters, events, and themes of Raising the Dead. However, it wasn’t until the publication of Rash’s fourth novel, Serena (2008), that he started to earn the popular and critical recognition he so richly deserves. In the past decade, the list of critical works has steadily grown, with articles appearing in journals such as Southern Quarterly, Mississippi Quarterly, and the Journal of Southern Culture, as well as in a few dissertations and essay collections. The publication of John Lang’s Understanding Ron Rash (2014; reviewed in NCLR Online 2017) marked the first book-length analysis of Rash’s output. Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon’s Summoning the Dead is the first book-length study that assembles a variety of scholarly articles devoted solely to Rash’s work. It is a welcome addition to the bourgeoning field of Rash studies, and it is an indispensable resource for present and future scholars of Ron Rash and Appalachian literature. In Summoning the Dead, Wilhelm and Vernon pull together sixteen essays from an impressive list of scholars who approach Rash’s work from a variety of viewpoints, including environmental studies, feminism, visual art, post-colonialism, speculative realism, history, and food studies. Many of the critics will be familiar to those who study Rash, Southern literature, and/or Appalachian
literature: David Cross Turner, Thomas Ærvold Bjerre, Frédérique Spill, Mae Miller Claxton, Erica Abrams Locklear, and John Lang, among others. Of the seventeen authors, at least six teach or were students in North Carolina and eight are located in states that border North Carolina. In addition to this regional focus, the presence of Bjerre and Spill, who teach in Denmark and France, respectively, attest to the transnational appeals of Rash’s work. The editors of the volume, Wilhelm and Vernon, who are both scholars in the fields of Southern and Appalachian literature, do a masterful job of collecting and editing a broad swath of voices and perspectives. In addition to co-authoring the introduction, they also each contribute important essays. They divide the book into three sections: “The Natural World,” “Intertextual Streams,” and “War, Memory, Violence,” and include essays that address Rash’s poetry, short stories, and novels. Summoning the Dead provides a wide breadth of analysis of Rash’s oeuvre to date. With some of the topics, the personal (yet professional) tone of many of the essays, and the use of atypical primary sources such as NPR call-in shows, it is a thoroughly contemporary collection that should provide a base for Rash scholarship for years to come. In the vein of the best scholarly writing, the essays employ good, close reading of the form and style of Rash’s works while addressing larger issues, themes, and connections. For example, Vernon uses a wealth of textual evidence to build his interpretation of Rash’s One Foot in Eden as a critique of James Dickey’s Deliverance. He argues that Rash’s more nuanced “accurate and evenhanded” depiction of Southern Agrarianism helps