68
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
TIME TO START OVER a review by Max Kilgore Dale Neal. Appalachian Book of the Dead. Southern Fried Karma LLC, 2019.
MAX KILGORE is working on his master’s degree with a concentration in Creative Writing at East Carolina University, where he also earned his BA in English. As an undergraduate, he served as an NCLR intern, and during his graduate program, he served as an editorial assistant and then as Senior Editorial Assistant. DALE NEAL is a novelist, teacher, and veteran journalist. His previous novels are award-winning Cow Across America (Novello Festival Press, 2009) and The Half-Life of Home (Casperian Books LLC, 2013; reviewed in NCLR Online 2014). He currently teaches fiction and nonfiction at Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Asheville Center for Graduate Studies.
Dale Neal’s newest novel, Appalachian Book of the Dead, follows four displaced strangers as they each find themselves starting a new chapter of their lives in the fictional Appalachian town of Yonah, NC. Though a diverse group in age and background, these strangers are drawn together by their common experience of suffering an immense loss. Neal employs the scriptures and structure of The Tibetan Book of the Dead to frame the events of his story. The forty-nine chapters in Neal’s novel parallel the forty-nine days of readings from The Tibetan Book of the Dead necessary “to comfort and guide the living into their next life” (204). Excerpts from the religious text also recur throughout the chapters, usually marking an important step for one of the main characters and foreshadowing the events that will unravel by the chapter’s end. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is first introduced to the reader when Ainsley Morse remembers a time she and her now-deceased boyfriend, Bernie, attended a Buddhist service focused on reincarnation during which the religious leader, Zhan Wu, explained the Buddhist belief: “we cycle endlessly along the Wheel of Birth and Death, confused and deluded unless we can see how to get off the merry-go-round” (41). According to Wu, with each cycle there are six realms one can be born into. Many readers presumably recognize this form of reincarnation when humans are transmigrated into lower or higher status or even animals based on the kind of person they were in their life, but Wu takes his explanation a bit deeper, providing Ainsley
(and readers) with the remaining realms that are often overlooked in popular culture, those of the Gods, Titans, and Demons. The final realm he mentions is that of the preta or “hungry ghosts,” big-bellied specters who are “always hungry, but they can never get enough to eat down their tiny mouths and their long thin throats. More, more, but never enough.” This realm prompts Ainsley’s interest as these eery beings remind her of the "yellow skin[ned]" Bernie who "always needed the next fix" (42). She asks if Wu believes the hungry ghosts are real, to which he responds, One way to look at it, is that we pass through these bardos ourselves every day before we physically die. Who among us hasn’t been blue as a human, or gone all the way into hell, lashing ourselves with our own fears disguised as demons. . . . And don’t you think you meet hungry ghosts every day, those people who are addicted to drugs, to drink, to power? They are never satisfied, they can’t get enough. (42)
This spiritual idea of the preta is a recurring theme in Appalachian Book of the Dead, as mentioned earlier, each of the story’s main characters suffers through their own mysterious losses that seem to keep them stuck in the realm of the past. Neal explores these losses and regrets through perspective shifts that feed the reader bits of these characters’ sordid pasts. These bits are not given all at once but rather sprinkled throughout the book, feeding readers just enough information to leave them wanting more by the end of the chapter, maintaining an air of suspense as the story shifts to its next narrative.