Thirty West published a review I wrote in “Afterimages.” I met the author during an online course organized by One Story, a decade ago, and remembered what a great writer she is, so I obtained her short story collection, Sidle Creek. Here’s the review:
Jolene McIlwain’s debut short story collection takes readers to a part of Appalachian Pennsylvania not many miles off the Interstate and north of Pittsburgh. In these stories, we encounter characters who are related perhaps to Hillary Clinton’s infamous “deplorables,” but who get treated with extreme tenderness by the author. Vivid writing and great dialogue make this book shine.
In “Loosed,” Luke Abraham supplements his income as a part-time mechanic by organizing cockfights, dogfights, and finally combat between his own young sons. Other stories feature millworkers, coalminers, waitresses, winners and losers, veterans, drifters, hunters and the hunted. Most of the characters work one or two low-paying jobs and scrounge around to make ends meet. Their families have lived in the backwoods for generations. They’re down on their luck, risk foreclosure, have big dreams that rarely come to fruition. No mystery to the fact that life today is tough, especially in this sliver of Pennsylvania that feels straight out of “The Deer Hunter.” Here, men with secure corporate jobs show up for a weekend of deer hunting and stop in at a restaurant for a meal or at a strip joint for a drink. The rural residents do not care for the “suits” but accept their presence as a necessary evil since everyone knows the added income helps the local economy. This unspoken antagonism is a recurring theme.
McIlwain lovingly paints these people without passing judgment. We learn the importance of community. In “You Four Are the One,” four elementary school girls go out of their way to help a neighbor carry her pregnancy to term. “The Fourth” gives us a family celebration of Independence Day. In “Those Red Boots,” when a perky waitress doesn’t show up at work and one of her boots is found bloodied, her boss becomes distraught worrying that a customer from out of town may have been responsible for her disappearance.
McIlwain’s descriptions blaze with authenticity. A chef makes sauces that “could send your mouth into the deep domain of hot sauce bliss.” In “Loosed,” McIlwain describes Luke’s wife June thus: “When he met her at 16, she looked nearly 20, all painted up with makeup to send her eyes into striking sideways glances, her glossed lips soft, smoking those Benson & Hedges like she was old enough to. Now, after giving birth to the four boys and sucking down two, sometimes three, packs a day, she looked nearer Luke’s age, maybe older with those makeup-caked lines around her lips and her bunched up nitpicking forehead.” The protagonist in “Eminent Domain” concludes her tale about a resident who has been killing house cats with, “I have to hop in my car and drive far as I can if I want to ever be anything that ain’t a few steps away from crazy.”
They all live near the fictitious Sidle creek, or played there in childhood, or fished for trout at some point, or remember when it flooded its banks. The creek even holds magical powers to some minds. Rumors claim a blind welder got his sight back after falling into the water. In “Shell,” Tiller Shanty and his Vietnamese wife Mai often return to the marsh in search of red-winged blackbird eggs whose shells’ markings will allow them to predict the future.
A third of the stories are flash, which initially feels disconcerting but soon that thought is left behind upon reading “Eminent Domain,” a mere 550 words of perfection.
McIlwain’s prose is crisp and spiky. Her take is compassionate. Her descriptions of nature are simply awesome. And these unusual stories stick with you. In “The Fractal Geometry of Grief,” Hubert Ashe, a retiree who recently moved to the countryside with his wife Genevieve, fixates on a doe as a replacement when Genevieve dies of a heart attack. Hubert breaks down after hunters from the city shoot and kill his beloved deer. The dialogue makes you both shiver with admiration and feel like a fly on the wall of one of the ramshackle houses that surround the Sidle, privy to information most people would never share willingly.
Jolene McIlwain grew up in Appalachian Pennsylvania. She makes us care about the lives of her characters. An excellent debut for a fine fiction writer!
