The Slow Creek and Other Stories

Tied together by the current of the sexual and psychological human drama that swirls around any place where people gather together in community, the narratives in The Slow Creek and Other Stories sweep the reader along. Peopled with small town characters living in the shadow of Big Savage Mountain, these stories unearth a darkness that lies buried in the town s communal soul, deep as the veins of coal that run under the town. Miners, hucksters, coal pickers, hermits, prostitutes, the dead and others ready to die walk the streets and cemetery on the hill. Walter Henderson is one of these. He has come back to the town to die, but there is something he must do first. And there is Arnold Williams who decided at the age of sixty-two that he would become invisible. There are the men who gather at the Asthma Bench to tell lies and jokes and discover a violent truth that haunts one of them. There is the woman who claims she is bringing the author of Roget s Thesaurus to town and Belle Halloran determined to find her place among those who scorned her. And all the others who seek escape and freedom from that which would drown them. In the background, an undercurrent of music plays taps or a drum beats and the jazz band weaves a spell that enchants and mesmerizes like the call of the Sirens. It is a soundtrack of sorrow that perfectly matches the sadness that sucks at the spirit of the town and its citizens like a whirlpool.