Above the Waterfall, by Ron Rash

There is a genre of fiction, it seems, devoted to drug-ravaged small town Appalachia, and this book must be its crowning glory. Ron Rash is a poet as well as a novelist, and it certainly shows. The first chapter is written in language so lush I had to double check that I was reading a novel and not poetry. We alternate chapters and perspectives between Becky, a park ranger who was traumatized at a young age by a school shooting, and Les, the soon-to-retire sheriff. Becky needs nature to sooth her, finds company in the quiet footstep of a river otter, the thrum of insects in a meadow. Les's chapters are an antidote to the richness of Becky's; he is intelligent but terse, tired - though he is only 51 - of witnessing young people waste away in the throes of meth addiction and take their well-meaning families down with them.

The action of the novel, so to speak, centers around an old man named Gerald, and his illicit visits to a portion of the river that is on the property of a local resort. He's accused of poaching the trout, and then of killing them in an oily genocide. Becky is his only friend, his staunch defender even when he's caught on camera in the forbidden territory above the waterfall. But as in many small towns, things aren't always as they seem, and the denizens are woven together by webs of involvement that must be untangled to find out what really happened, and why.

This is a quiet book, understated and powerful in its depiction of a region in decline and the small things each person clings to in order to stay on the straight and narrow. Rash is a skillful writer, to say the least, and I'll be keeping my eye out for his work in the future.

Buy it here!