North Carolina LGBTQ+ Literature
THE BEGINNING IN THE END a review by Onyx Bradley Gregory Ariail. The Gospel of Rot. Mercer University Press, 2022.
When our first introduction to a protagonist involves a graveyard meeting with an orchardist turned telepathic apple tree, we know we’re in for a fantastic read. The North Carolina mountains are truly peculiar in Gregory Ariail’s novel The Gospel of Rot. The main character is a seventy-year-old woman, Amelia, who lives with her dying father, Emil. After her father’s death, Amelia’s quest to explore her homeland leads her on a surreal journey, and she discovers that things and people are rarely what they seem. Complement all of that with the author’s beautiful, if bizarre, prose. Amelia and her father are hermits living on a plot of land they’ve nicknamed “Amelia’s World,” which is “a hundred and twenty acres of oak, creek, and granite dome” (5). Ariail’s descriptions of the landscape throughout the book are all detailed, and the opening section about Amelia’s World is a particularly strong reflection of the author’s talent: We’d search for lonely, abandoned chimneys from the nineteenth cen-
ONYX BRADLEY was born in Charlotte and grew up in Pikeville, NC. They received honorable mention in the inaugural Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize contest in 2023. Onyx earned a BA in English at East Carolina University and is now completing their MA in English with a Creative Writing concentration. During their graduate program, they served as an NCLR Editorial Assistant and taught composition. GREGORY ARIAIL grew up in Buford, GA, and is an instructor at the University of Alabama where he earned his MFA. He has also earned English degrees from the University of Georgia (a BA), Oxford University (a MSt), and the University of Michigan (a PhD). He has published short fiction, nonfiction, book reviews, and literary essays in a varity of periodicals.
tury, the relics of the cabins of Cherokee and frontiersmen, which often tilted dramatically on uneven ground. One can find these all over western North Carolina, hidden in rhododendron coves: creek rocks rising twelve feet high layered with clay chinking and reinforced with rope, hair, and hog’s blood. Over time, bees bored
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The author brings the landscape and characters to life with picturesque descriptions of the mountains and forests in the Appalachian countryside he says inspired the novel.* The book itself is formatted as Amelia’s journal, which begins with her recording her father’s final words but evolves into something more akin to a scrapbook. There are also a few chapters that feel like loose paper stuck between the pages. For example, one chapter is comprised of letters between Emil and one of his photographer friends and another is a list of names labeled “The List in the Folder Labeled ‘Cold Weather Scenes.’” These inclusions give the reader an idea about what Amelia is doing beyond what she’s writing down, namely searching her father’s belongings to get an understanding of who he was outside of being her father. Each postcard and crumpled piece of paper Amelia sticks in the “journal” she’s writing helps build the reader’s understanding of her relationship with her father and how different the new world Amelia finds herself in is from the one she’s used to. After Emil’s death, Amelia decides she no longer wants to be a hermit. She begins her explorations outside of Amelia’s World using her father’s photographs to guide her choice of destination:
into the chinking’s hard pottery. Sometimes we’d light a fire in one of
Each day, I’ll choose a photograph
these crumbling hearths and smoke
from the folders of his landscapes
would pour out of the holes. (5)
and visit whatever location speaks to
* See Ivy Clark, “Q&A with Author Gregory Ariail, The Gospel of Rot,” Mercer UP website.