Contemporary Authors

• Ghostly Lighthouses from Maine to Florida John F. Blair (Winston-Salem, NC), 2005
• Monsters in Appalachia: Stories Vandalia Press (Morgantown, WV), 2016

1. Monsters in Appalachia : stories LCCN 2016017730 Type of material Book Personal name Monks, Sheryl, 1967- author. Uniform title Short Stories. Selections Main title Monsters in Appalachia : stories / Sheryl Monks. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Morgantown, West Virginia : Vandalia Press, 2016. Description 169 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781943665396 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3613.O5365 A6 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Ghostly lighthouses from Maine to Florida LCCN 2005005219 Type of material Book Personal name Monks, Sheryl, 1967- Main title Ghostly lighthouses from Maine to Florida / Sheryl Monks. Published/Created Winston-Salem, N.C. : John F. Blair, c2005. Description xii, 145 p. : ill. ; 21 cm. ISBN 9780895873101 0895873109 (pbk. : alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip058/2005005219.html CALL NUMBER BF1472.U6 M64 2005 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Sheryl Monks Home Page - https://www.sherylmonks.com/bio

  About the Author
  Sheryl Monks is the author of Monsters in Appalachia (Vandalia Press/West Virginia University Press). She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte. Her stories have appeared in Rkvry Quarterly, Electric Literature, The Butter, The Greensboro Review, storySouth, Regarding Arts and Letters, Night Train, and other journals, and in the anthologies Surreal South and Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Contemporary West Virginia Fiction and Poetry, among others. She is a past winner of the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award, recipient of a North Carolina Regional Artist's Project Grant, and a previous finalist for the Hudson Prize, sponsored by Black Lawrence Press. She lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she works for a peer-reviewed medical journal and edits the online literary magazine Change Seven.

• The Review Review - http://www.thereviewreview.net/interviews/it%E2%80%99s-about-trusting-my-instincts-chat-sheryl-monk

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  "It’s About Trusting My Instincts." A Chat With Sheryl Monks, Author of Monsters in Appalachia
  Interview with Sheryl Monks

  Sheryl Monks is a fiction writer, literary editor, and teacher. Her first collection of stories, Monsters in Appalachia, is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press in November 2016. She is a co-founder of Press 53, has served as a writer in residence at Salem College, and founded Change Seven, an online literary magazine, in January 2015.
  Interview by Laura Moretz
  First off, I loved reading Monsters in Appalachia, and I was captivated by the voices that told the stories, particularly in “Barry Gibb is Cutest Bee Gee” and “The Immortal Jesse James.” The voices of these stories feel united by something that transcends geography and time. How would you say they are related to each other? Put another way, how are these separate stories part of a singular book?
  Wow. I love great questions like this that invite me to consider interesting aspects of my work, things I may not have thought about before. I do think voice is one of the unifying elements of the book, and maybe that’s because writing is a very audible experience for me. If I can’t “hear” stories, I seldom have luck finishing them, no matter how promising they feel. I’m a slow writer. It’s taken a decade to finish the 15 stories in this collection, and I have at least as many more that I’m still playing around with, stories I know in my bones have something interesting to say but just haven’t yet made their voices known to me. One of the gifts of growing up in Appalachia is being surrounded by the oral tradition. Sadly, I didn’t inherit the talent for actually “telling” stories. I’ve always been on the receiving end, and I’m grateful for that because it taught me how to hear, to listen on a level that’s quite honestly more deeply ingrained than I’m even cognizant of. It’s not the sort of listening we’re encouraged to do in creative writing classes, although those are certainly good and instructive for some people.
  The problem for me, though, with that kind of mindset – that I’ll go out and document what I hear or see or whatever – is that it creates too much distance between me and the story. I tried that for a few years, approaching fiction like a historian, but that only made me “think.” And what I’ve learned from studying writers I admire like Flannery O’Connor, Robert Olen Butler, and others, is that writing fiction is more about tapping into our senses than it is about thinking. For me it’s about trusting my instincts, and somewhere deep down inside that oral tradition got etched in my brain. If I’m lucky enough to tap into that place, where the voices reside, then I can sometimes get swept into the flow and let the story itself order its way.
  I see that “Little Miss Bobcat” was the first published story included in the collection. How did that publication come about? What are some of meaningful literary magazine publishing moments for these stories?
  Yes, that was the first story I ever wrote, as a matter of fact. It actually took a while to find publication. I wrote LMB as a graduate student at Queens, and again, the voice seemed to resonate with my classmates, even though the story had plenty of other problems. I first submitted it to a contest judged by Algonquin Books editor Shannon Ravenel, and low and behold it won. But even though the win came with a nice cash prize, the award didn’t include publication, which was a little disappointing at the time. Later, though, I realized it only afforded me another opportunity to put the story back out into the world. And that happened when the good folks at Stephen F. Austen State University accepted the story for publication in RE:AL – Regarding Arts & Letters.
  Concerning the second part of your question, publication is always meaningful to me. It’s always deeply personal when I know an editor sat completely alone with my work for a few minutes and felt moved by it in some way and was compelled to share it with others. That touches me profoundly. These are people who do what they do for essentially nothing. They’re not paid. They’re often not even widely known. But year after year they dig through the slush pile for the singular joy of finding a piece of work that resonates with them. When I imagine people like Rusty Barnes, Terry Kennedy, Jim Clark, John Branscom, Pinckney and Laura Benedict, Roxane Gay, Sheldon Compton, Supriya Bhatnagar, Robert James Russell, Jeff Pfaller, Jon McConnell, Shannon Ravenel, Abby Freeland, Laura Long, and all the others sitting there, holding my work and thinking to themselves--yeah, this is pretty good stuff… man, I just can’t imagine anything more rewarding than that. Some have been kind enough to publish my work in more than one publication. It’s incredible the support I’ve gotten from these people. And it continues long after a piece has appeared in their journals. They keep on, year after year, championing me. I’ll never be able to repay them.
  Did any of the editors involved with the lit mag publication of these stories make suggestions for changes or has publication been pretty much an “as is” experience? Is there anything that surprised you about the path your story collection took toward publication?
  Every journal is a little different, but yes, I’ve gotten excellent editorial oversight from places like The Greensboro Review and elsewhere. Seven single-spaced pages, to be exact, from TGR. It was an intensely close reading of my story “Barry Gibb Is the Cutest Bee Gee.” And what an unbelievable act of generosity it is when a team of editors, which is often the case, circles around your work and rolls up their sleeves with the single purpose of mind to make it better. So few people are willing to do that. It’s exceedingly rewarding when that’s been offered.
  No surprises, really. It takes a while, and every step has been necessary. I used to be impatient. Maybe we all are in the beginning. But I’ve learned something with every story, and I hope that makes for a rich experience when readers immerse themselves in the collection.

  It’s always deeply personal when I know an editor sat completely alone with my work for a few minutes and felt moved by it in some way and was compelled to share it with others. That touches me profoundly.

  In what way would you say that publishing in the literary magazines led up to assembling a collection?
  The two-fold process of first being published in reputable literary magazines and then advancing to book publication has been crucial to my development as a writer. I’m just a better writer now, and the fact that I can say that without a shred of arrogance is a testament to that literary writer’s journey. I’ve learned some things along the way that I wouldn’t have known otherwise. The book is better than it would’ve been a decade ago, no question.
  About ten years ago, you and Kevin Morgan Watson founded Press 53. How did your experience as a book publisher affect your life as a writer?
  Press 53 is where I really became aware of the work that lay ahead of me as a writer. We received so many phenomenal book manuscripts that we literally couldn’t publish them all. It was discouraging, and for a while, I actually felt like I had no business even trying to write when there were so many better writers out there getting turned down, day in day out. But then my father died, and I was faced, as we are during these painful times in our lives, with my own mortality. I didn’t think it would happen, really. I stopped worrying about publishing at all. I just focused as much as I could on the writing, and occasionally when something turned out alright, I tossed it out there to the literary community. Ever so slowly, but surely, I stumbled along.
  Almost two years ago, you launched Change Seven, an online literary magazine that you release three times a year and update weekly. Beyond the obvious question about how you sustain this effort, please tell us how you see the aesthetic of Change Seven.
  Sustaining an online magazine is more challenging than I realized, especially now that I’m working full-time and trying to promote Monsters. But creating that space where other writers can step into their own career paths is important to me and all of us at Change Seven. I can’t in good conscience take all that has been given to me by the literary community and not give back to it in some way. Like countless other magazines, Change Seven makes it possible for emerging authors to publish right alongside more established writers. We can’t cultivate writers without literary magazines and indie publishers. And I’m a big proponent of literary citizenship. The experience of working on both sides of the page is as enriching as studying craft. The writers who have been committed volunteers at Change Seven or anywhere else are becoming better writers than they would’ve been had they simply invested all their time on their own work. I know some will disagree, but they can be wrong if they want to be. Ha ha.
  The aesthetic at Change Seven is maybe a bit too literal. We’re all about change. But what that means for one person is seldom the same for another. When Antonios Maltezos and I sat down to come up with a title for the magazine, we settled first on a quote we both liked from a Paris Review interview with Dorothy Parker who said, “I can’t write five words but that I change seven.” To me that spoke not only to the endeavor of writing but also to our roles as editors. We do offer edits to our writers, and we wanted that clear up front. But beyond that, change spoke to us as students and teachers of fiction. Something has to change in a story or else there’s no story there at all. And then change became even bigger when we considered the idea of asking contributors to blog about what it means to them. It’s a simple idea, but it offers unlimited possibilities to us thematically.
  Change Seven reads like a dialogue within a community of writers because of the frequent updates and new additions on the site. Does it feel that way to you?
  I’m glad to hear you say that, and yes, we’re always looking for ways to broaden the conversations. One of the advantages we have as an online magazine is that there’s no separation anymore between writers and readers and editors. We’re all online together, and we’re all reaching out to each other. The web has made community building much easier and a more enriching experience than it once was when we were all writing alone in our guest bedrooms and submitting our work with SASEs to what often felt like black holes.
  What are some of the things you’ve learned from editing an online literary magazine? What’s your favorite part of the process?
  It’s first coming across that piece of work that sends you headlong into your own experience of the world in some way. It’s indulging in something beautiful and truthful, relishing it just because such things exist in this maddening world and some people keep making them, and a few of us are fortunate enough to know them with an intimacy that’s hard to describe to those who just don’t get it. We pity those fools. And then it’s writing to those authors and failing miserably to express just how much their work means to us. The demands of putting it all together often leaves us little time or energy to adequately convey how that one piece of work makes the world just a little bit brighter, not in some cockeyed optimistic way, but in the sense that it’s brave in its rendering of truth. We take some consolation in knowing that we have a hand in putting it out there to speak to others.
  What are you looking for in terms of submissions to Change Seven? Do you need more fiction, poetry, or essays? How about book reviews and interviews?
  In general, we need more art in differing formats. I’d love to work with some illustrators, sculptors, mixed media artists, animators, conceptual artists. We need work from more writers of color. We need a broader array of content: videos, podcasts. I’d love to see some coverage of literary festivals and other events. Craft essays would be nice. We’re open to ideas for the blog. We need more humor. Reviews, interviews, yes, and with artists of other kinds, filmmakers, say, or visual artists, musicians, dancers, etc. We’ve been fortunate in assembling a talented group of regular columnists, but there’s room for more. I’d love to find writers who can respond to timely issues, the things that are changing so rapidly in the world around us. In terms of creative stuff, we’re simply interested in seeing your best work. Read previous issues, and send us something we haven’t done before.

  Laura Moretz is the interviews editor for The Review Review. Her short stories have appeared in Stoneboat, r.kv.r.y. Quarterly Literary Journal and Cutthroat.

• Split Lip - http://www.splitlipmagazine.com/18-sheryl-monks-interview

  An Interview with Author Sheryl Monks
  by Jon McConnell

  First, congratulations on your soon to be published collection with WVU Press! This is the 2nd story, right? As your collection is called Monsters in Appalachia, is there a specific piece of Appalachian life that you feel "Robbing Pillars" illuminates? There's a lot of coal mining fiction out there but your chosen premise here is very evocative and unique.

  Thank you. The collection will be coming out this November, and I couldn’t be more grateful to the staff at WVUP. I can’t imagine a better fit for the book. And yes, this is the second story in the collection, and it falls into the group of stories I feel is at the heart of it, what I call the Appalachia stories, although all of them speak in some way to the region. But about half of the book is written in a style that I feel is my truest writing voice. It’s gritty and a bit dark often, and it’s the work I’m most satisfied with. It’s funny when you’re titling a collection how you begin to look for, or maybe only accidentally see, themes emerging across a body of work. And that’s what happened with Monsters. For a long time I felt I was writing more than one book. I had these, what I called, girl stories. And then I had these Appalachia stories. And then I also had some surreal stuff. The title story is, as you might imagine, a pretty strange tale. But that story, like “Robbing Pillars,” holds to the general style and voice of the grittier Appalachia stories. You start to see there are all these connections, all these little echoes back and forth between pieces of work, and place is the glue that binds them, although there are also recurring ideas of good and evil, with a variety of what might be called monsters. In the title story, the monsters are actual monsters, end-times Biblical monsters. But in other stories, the monsters are more likely us, or characters very much like us. When I set out to write “Robbing Pillars,” I had no notions of monsters, no intention of writing about anything remotely similar to monsters. I simply wanted to write about a story my father had told me about a young coal miner he witnessed being electrocuted in the mines. It was a haunting story but one I loved. I wanted to hear Dad tell it as often as he would. I wanted to try and imagine what that must’ve been like. Naturally, my father didn’t enjoy reliving such a painful experience, but I was only a kid and oblivious. Until I actually began to write the story. Then I began to understand I was writing about ghosts.

  Your central rhetorical move here, splitting the climax into two versions for Maiden, is really well done. You nonchalantly step out of strict linearity and realtime detail and allow the story to bloom into this seamless blend of real and imagined imagery. Could you talk a bit about when/how you decided to do this, and why?

  I was interested in writing a story where the reader is immediately alerted that something bad is going to happen. I was teaching my students the difference between tension and suspense in fiction, and I wanted to try it more intentionally myself. I knew where the story was going from the outset. I knew how it was going to go. What I found when I reached the end of the story I’d heard told to me all my life was that there was more to discover. What did it mean to the reader, and how would it have impacted the protagonist? I had to find out, so I wrote beyond the end of the story as I knew it from my father’s telling. At some point it must’ve dawned on me that the story was a kind of nightmare, a memory that can’t be wiped away. And then I thought of every coal miner who’s ever crawled down into what might very well become his own grave, and I wondered how they do it. How do they face their fears while carrying so many memories of their fellow miners who’ve been killed alongside them? I’ve had uncles who were injured badly in the mines. Some who’ve died. I needed a way of conjuring those ghosts, so I gave the protagonist room to ruminate on the first part of the story. Once he began to reflect on the incident, he came upon the notion that he was seeing things in two ways simultaneously. I knew then I could play with that. It became an axis point that allowed me to pivot to the left or to the right. I could write on both sides until I saw where the story would take me. And that’s when the aunt stepped in, and she became the key that finally unlocked the whole story, I think. Once I had her and the idea of the dowsing stick, I felt the story congealing. It’s impossible to predict at the outset how any story will unfold. You just find yourself casting out ahead of yourself and waiting for the next little tug on your fishing line.

  Who were you reading while you wrote this and the other stories in your collection?

  I wrote the stories over a span of about 10 years. It’s hard to say how long really. I don’t get up every day as many writers do and put in the time. I have to wait until stories untangle themselves. The title story, for example, sprang up all at once in a dream. I woke up with several lines in my head, and I immediately started writing the story. But then I came to an impasse that took another four years or so to wait out. Eventually, I had another dream, and improbably that one finished the narrative. It was a similar situation with “Robbing Pillars.” I knew I wanted to write my dad’s story, but I had no idea how to do it. I’d already learned that telling the literal truth in fiction is the surest way to kill a story. I waited for years before I finally decided it was time to wrestle it onto the page. Luckily, that one did come about all in a matter of weeks. So over the course of writing the collection, my reading roamed widely, from my time as a student and up through teaching fiction myself. As a student and also as a writing instructor, we’re required to read broadly, and I’ve enjoyed that. As an undergraduate I was required to read every one of Toni Morrison’s novels for one class, and I’ve always appreciated that professor for giving me that gift. I loved the brutal beauty of Morrison, loved the way she could terrify me and then turn around and break my heart. I loved the way she would not look away, nor would she let me. I was inspired way back then, I think, to summon that kind of courage on the page. So I began to look at my own history, began to look for writers writing about my corner of the world, Appalachia. I didn’t think I’d find many. But then I came upon Robert Morgan’s work, and I’ve read it over and over so many times now. Then I found others from North Carolina, Ron Rash, John Ehle. I began to wonder who there might be writing about West Virginia, where I’d lived when I was very young, and that’s when I found Breece d’j Pancake and then Ann Pancake, Pinckney Benedict, Denise Giardina. But there are so many others I’ve read over the past decade. I’ve really taken to Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Stuart Dybek. I return to all of these again and again.

  Did those authors affect how you approached your work at all?

  There are definitely writers whose work called to me on many of the stories, as I was working them. Sometimes it’s a combination of things that brings a story about. I have one story called “Run, Little Girl” that is largely drawn from a personal experience that I didn’t want to write about in any sort of literal sense. My mentor at the time, Pinckney Benedict, was making a huge impact on my reading and writing. I’d basically signed up for the MFA program at Queens because he was there. That’s how much I loved the realist fiction he’d written up to then. But as we began to work together, I realized his own writing was undergoing major transformation. He was moving toward surrealism and away from the realist stuff I loved. I came around to his new style and quickly began to deeply appreciate it. He suggested I try to write the story using a technique he calls the impossible probable, which in a nutshell calls for treating a story in much the same manner that Flannery O’Connor did, by allowing the accumulation of details to so thoroughly ground the narrative in time and space that any improbabilities are never questioned by the reader. Pinckney suggested I write the story about an angel, a full-blown seraphim, and I wish I’d been able to pull that story off. I wasn’t able to do it at the time, and I’m not sure I ever will be. But the exercise was enough to show me ways to push the details as far away from my own experience as possible and still write with the same urgency of my own memory and emotion. I came upon the idea of writing a story about a girl who seduces a man who looks a lot like the devil. And I didn’t know if he was the devil or not, and I didn’t want my reader to know either. I remembered Joyce Carol Oates’ fabulous story, but I didn’t want to replicate anything about hers except for the kind of tension she creates in that story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” I wouldn’t let myself read her story again for fear of voice creep or being overly influenced. I don’t know if I’ve read it since, as a matter of fact. I just held to what I remembered of it, Arnold Friend standing at the door of a young girl, waiting for her to invite him inside. There’s also Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” I wanted to develop a character like, someone who might or might not be more than what he appears. I love the way JCO manages conflict and tension in that story. It’s understated, as I remember. I wanted to do something similar, but I was equally compelled to push the conflict further, to summon that courage I’d admired in Morrison’s work. At the same time, I had this loop of Ron Rash’s voice, playing in my head. I’d heard him read a portion of One Foot in Eden in Burnsville, NC, at the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival. There was something about the cadence of his speech that got inside me. When I began to write “Run, Little Girl,” I had all these influences converging at once. Even today when I read that story, I hear Ron’s voice in my head. And maybe that’s why that story has always been my personal favorite in the collection. It makes me feel connected to those writers I most admire.

  What are working on now? Did you learn anything from writing "Robbing Pillars" that affects how you work on your new stuff?

  I’m working on a personal essay. And I’m also letting a novel steep. It’s been milling around in my head for almost as many years as the story collection did. Perhaps it’ll begin to untangle itself for me now that the stories are finished. Did I learn anything from writing “Robbing Pillars”? That’s a good question, one I haven’t thought about until now. Going back over my thought process for this interview has made me re-remember just how important it is to follow your intuition. I cannot force a story. I can’t hurry one along. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I wish it did. I’d write a lot faster and a lot more maybe. I guess what you’ve reminded me is how “Robbing Pillars” and all the stories in this collection were written by following my hunches. Maybe I’m learning to trust the process more. I still have students who contact me occasionally, seeking feedback on their work. They’re so impatient with themselves. They want to get it right, right now. We all do, of course. But it can often be a disservice to the work. Every story needs to sit with itself, figure out what it wants to be. Our job is just to watch it closely and step up when the story itself has done the untangling.

Monsters in Appalachia
Publishers Weekly. 263.37 (Sept. 12, 2016): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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* Monsters in Appalachia

Sheryl Monks. Vandalia (CDC, dist.), $16.99 (176p) ISBN 978-1-943665-39-6

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Monks knows her monsters, both literal and figurative. And she knows the territory of hills and hollers, where reality is sometimes heightened so sharply that it bleeds into myth. The 15 ferociously compressed stories in her collection sear their way into the reader's brain with matter-of-fact horror. In just six pages, the opening story, "Burning Slag," lets one grim, violent moment in the life of a troubled mother point to a future shimmering with brutal shocks. Monks (All the Girls in France) follows it up with the wrenching "Robbing Pillars," a claustrophobic coal-mining tale with a touch of the supernatural. These stories sparkle with dark, extreme humor, such as "Nympho," in which the relatively law-abiding son of Amway-dealing parents finds himself under the sway of a fellow middle schooler given to "throwing his lanky white arms into wild frog punches." Others are naturalistic: a novel's worth of family and community relationships are fitted into "Little Miss Bobcat." And with the title story, the final one in the collection, Monks ventures deep into the realm of myth, for a satisfying vision of the intersection of the momentous and the everyday. (Nov.)

"Monsters in Appalachia." Publishers Weekly, 12 Sept. 2016, p. 32. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464046223&it=r&asid=bdaab61c9ff41ee3102c359b0defe427. Accessed 11 June 2017.

• Los Angeles Review
  http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-monsters-in-appalachia-by-sheryl-monks/
  Word count: 1248

  BOOK REVIEW: MONSTERS IN APPALACHIA BY SHERYL MONKS
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  Monsters in Appalachia: Stories
  By Sheryl Monks
  Vandalia Press, November 2016
  ISBN-13: 978-1943665-39-6
  $16.99, 192 pp.
  Reviewed by Ryan Boyd

  In the 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe published an itinerant column (it hopped from one failing magazine to another) called “Marginalia,” where his concerns were, broadly speaking, poetry and politics. In one of the installments, “The Name of the Nation” (1846), he contends that “America” is not a “distinctive” name, because it can refer to places besides the United States, and proposes renaming the country “Appalachia,” a lyrical indigenous word that, he claims, honors the natives whom whites dispossessed yet suits the young nation’s vigor: “nothing could be more sonorous, more liquid, or of fuller volume, while its length is just sufficient for dignity.”

  The rechristening didn’t pan out. Appalachia, where I grew up (Alleghany County, Virginia), occupies a strange place in American history, because it has long been locked into a dialectic of neglect and reverence. Treasured for its stunning mountains and valleys and praised for the hardiness of its people, Appalachia is enormous, running from southern New York down through north Mississippi, with its heart in the great hillbilly nexus of North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Without its wood pulp, there would be fewer glossy magazines and literary journals. Without its coal, the electricity that powers Macbooks would be more expensive. Without its music, American pop culture would sound quite different. But in many other respects, Appalachia is a forsaken zone, often mocked as redneck heaven, pure Trump country; stricken with high rates of poverty, addiction, disease, and suicide; and environmentally devastated by the industries that give a decreasing number of its men and women a subsistence wage. I still remember the sodden clear-cuts, and the octopus of a paper mill that stank up the Jackson River Valley. To borrow Faulkner’s ethnographic term, Appalachia is Snopes country.

  Monsters in Appalachia, Sheryl Monks’ debut collection, consists largely of Snopes stories. Sometimes these entail confrontations between local elites and poor people, as in “Clinch,” where a mountain family comes to town for supplies and encounters the arrogant sheriff while Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” speech plays in the background. But the ruling class, such as it is in Appalachia, doesn’t show up much in Monks’ stories. Most of the time, economically precarious (though not necessarily impoverished) whites own the stage.

  And what stage is that? In one of his many perfect turns of phrase, Gore Vidal calls the novel “our lovely vulgar and most human art.” Of all genres, novels are the most densely populated and expansive realms of action, more heterogeneous in their world-building than, say, lyric poetry, which is concerned with one speaker’s response to experience. Literary fiction, with its heightened attention to style as much as to plot and character, approaches the condition of a multi-voiced poetry, particularly when a narrative adopts free indirect style, blending the characters’ voices with the narrator’s or novelist’s perspective. This magic trick is especially intense in short stories, where there is less plot exposition than in a novel, and where the cuts of characters’ lives are shorter and more psychologically concentrated.

  What emerges from Monsters is a minute anthropology of violence, some forms of it intensely present, others what we might call “infrastructural”: the violence of factories and mines (“Out from the little hollows where they clambered bent-backed into the earth to mine the black diamonds that enslave them,” observes a travelling magician); of failed marriages; of bonds between mothers and teen daughters; of Vietnam; of school buses ruled by small tyrants; of poverty; of sex (e.g., “a surge of power inside me like a burning tornado, a volcano turned inside out”). Sometimes violence is rendered humorously, like in “Nympho,” the tale of two middle-schoolers obsessed with the prettiest stoner girl in town, which plays like a Richard Linklater film. But most of the time the violence is grim, with the usual grubby stakes, and a mood of dread shadows everything. Witness the terrifying “Justice Boys,” in which a gang of outlaws pursues the wife of a man they hate down a dark rural highway; or the black comedy of “Crazy Checks,” where an electrocuted factory worker “just stood there conducting electricity like a cheap Taiwan toaster.”

  Monks’ attention to immediate consciousness is granular and gripping. In the first story, a badly traumatized woman who killed her abusive husband stares into a void of burning coal slag and pines for her children. She is drawn obsessively to the toxic landscape, a mirror of her own life: “It was the kerosene burns on the babies what found her negligent, sores where they’d crawled through raw fuel that one of the older ones had sloshed when filling the heater. Most people said she’d lost her sense from being beaten so often in the head, but they showed no pity on her. Now here she was, wandering the hillsides like a revenant.” The next narrative takes place in another coal hell—an unstable mine. “Already, they have cut a strip in both directions,” sweats the narrator, “and soon they’ll be coming back through the middle, robbing pillars it’s called,” his mind churning up the ironically poetic idiom.

  There are actual monsters in these pages, too. Monks saves them for last, the magic-realist title story. Melding the horrible and the comic, it depicts a countryside overrun by strange creatures, and involves, for instance, a hideous, bat-like fallen angel sharing a dinner with the elderly couple who own and employ him as a tout for their roadside freakshow, which is composed of other captive demons, some of whom they eat. Mountain tradition gets conscripted into the service of beast hunting: “Anse’s Plotts are of an olden breed, the keenest ever was. They can scent things never heard tell of. Trees? Why that must be simple, she guesses. She herself can scent trees, pine rosin and fruiting pawdads, thought not at a full tear through the dark.” The old mountain woman and her man, stock Appalachian characters, enter apocalyptic modernity, and the story closes with a Biblical vision of the world’s end.

  Appalachia is a place of frustrated longing. This informs the traditions of its fundamentalist Christianity, which craves a purified world. It fuels the outlaw moonshine culture that has given way to a plague of pills and heroin—a stillborn yearning for chemical escape. It shows up in cross-connected economic, geographical, and affective terms: the drive to get out, to find jobs that don’t involve coal or logging or Medicaid. I heeded that longing, heading to college after high school. Now I live in Los Angeles, where most of my neighbors know as much about Appalachia as I do about Oaxaca. Then again, after sixteen years I don’t know all that much about Appalachia either.

  Monsters in Appalachia made me want to go back, at least for a visit. To write about Appalachia is to write about America, as Poe realized, even if that is also where monsters are, and Sheryl Monks reports from this countryside as only a novelist can.

  Ryan Boyd teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Koreatown, Los Angeles.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sheryl-monks/monsters-in-appalachia/
  Word count: 403

  MONSTERS IN APPALACHIA
  by Sheryl Monks
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  KIRKUS REVIEW
  A varied cast of mothers, miners, school kids, and mountain folk grapple with desire, poverty, and, yes, even monsters in 15 stories set across Appalachia.

  Monks’ stories are so wide-ranging—from all-too-real portrayals of the horrors of adolescence to deep dives into the fantastical—that they’re difficult to classify as a whole. What most of them have in common are characters trying to do the best they can in a landscape often dark and unforgiving. In the opening story, “Burning Slag,” a woman who's lost her son to foster care spies on him from her car and employs a most disturbing strategy to try to get him back. Told in retrospect, “Merope” is about a young man’s kind-of-sweet, kind-of–mean-spirited flirtation with a girl who “wasn’t much to look at.” Poverty is a theme throughout. In “Little Miss Bobcat,” a young girl hopes to “win a genuine quartz crown” by soliciting the most contributions for her school fundraiser, despite her family’s own lack of money. An encounter between a shop owner and a mother using food stamps to buy groceries is the seemingly mundane premise behind the masterful “Clinch.” While many of the stories here are rooted in the everyday, the speculative offerings are equally satisfying. “Rasputin’s Remarkable Sleight of Hand” features a carnival magician who knows, in the age of cellphones and selfies, that he needs to up the “razzle-dazzle” in his act, and he attempts it in a way few readers will anticipate. In “Black Shuck,” a man who tends to and then gives away a stray dog becomes obsessed with the idea that misfortune will befall him if he can’t get it back. And in the hallucinatory title story, inner demons are substituted with actual ones, as an older couple is forced to contend with monsters.

  A memorable debut: each of these stories is as original and multidimensional as the characters who inhabit them.

  Pub Date: Nov. 1st, 2016
  ISBN: 978-1-943665-39-6
  Page count: 176pp
  Publisher: Vandalia Press/West Virginia Univ.
  Review Posted Online: Aug. 23rd, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1st, 2016

• Colorado Review
  http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/monsters-in-appalachia/
  Word count: 1442

  Book Review
  Monsters in Appalachia
  Fiction
  By Sheryl Monks
  Reviewed By R. T. Both

  West Virginia University Press (2016)
  180 pages
  $14.09
  Buy this book

  A collection of fifteen stories, Sheryl Monks’s Monsters in Appalachia illuminates a fictional terrain that is both achingly familiar and underrepresented. Monks’s Appalachia is a place of miners laboring in impossibly dangerous conditions, poor women with drunken husbands, greed, exploitation, and desperate love. But it’s also a place where middle class children are bullied and young girls have mothers who are just a little too hot. It’s a place that’s broadly recognizable and relatable, yet Monks presents her characters in ways that are largely unexpected. Her fictional worlds are drawn with precision and insight, revealing surprising truths.

  Monks writes about people and places we don’t see enough in contemporary short stories. The collection begins with this curious sentence:

  All the children had been given away, and now Darcus Mullins found herself driving the curving road up toward Isaban to look again at the burning slag heap.

  Darcus’s children have been put in foster care, a situation that is rare enough in contemporary short fiction, but to have that emotionally wrenching circumstance juxtaposed with a mound of burning slag is genuinely remarkable. I can’t remember ever having read a story that featured any kind of slag heap. In fact, I had to look up the term to be sure what it was. This story quickly puts readers on notice that they are entering a word of unqualified originality.

  But it’s not the burning slag heap—probably refuse left over from coal extraction—that really interests Darcus. It is her son, Leonard, whose new foster home she drives past on the way to Isaban. He is outside happily playing with his foster sisters in a situation that seems idyllic, loving, and safe—a situation Monks paints with a few telling details: the children “patting pies into shape” and the “little white heads” of the foster sisters, one of whom has “her arm crooked up over his neck.” But when Darcus guns the car past her son’s new home, Leonard runs after it and is “doubled over bawling” when he fails to catch up with his mother.

  Deep, self-sacrificing, and even courageous maternal love, especially from women who have been let down by their men, is one of the themes of this collection. The first story, in a mere six pages, gives Monks’s readers a glimpse of Darcus’s grim reality that they won’t easily shake off, and reveals Darcus’s love for her child without presenting it as in any way redemptive.

  The next story, “Robbing Pillars,” takes readers to the depths of a coal mine, the place where slag heaps like the one that offers Darcus peculiar comfort are produced, and a place of such raw cruelty that the miners who inhabit this level of hell are almost forced to dwell in the realm of the supernatural. This story’s ghosts are a hint of what’s to come later in the collection.

  The fraught lives of working class husbands and wives are also thematic in this collection, but the kinds of marriages that keep country music booming avoid becoming clichés in Monks’s fiction. In “The Immortal Jesse James,” Jane, a young wife with a baby, travels cross-country by car with her husband, Boy Baby, and his two brothers. The aptly named Boy Baby convinces Jane they need to make a detour to visit a bat-infested cave which was once a hideout for the James gang. What appears in this story to be a recipe for disaster becomes instead a moment when a young married woman experiences a quiet sense of her own agency. Or at least, the story hints that this may be the case. The arrangement of Monks’s stories is one of the pleasures of this collection, its unexpected turns making for a thrilling ride. And this story’s ending, coming after the depiction of two such harsh fates, is a shock of a different kind.

  Some of Monks’s writing has a vintage 1970s feel, and she says in her acknowledgements that family stories she heard repeated over and over are a source of inspiration. Yet, in a story like “Barry Gibb Is the Cutest Bee Gee,” the vivid details and subtly mounting tension create something fresh and dynamically different from disco era clichés. In this story, a mother, a pubescent daughter, and an aunt are tanning in the summer heat while two handsome young men do yard work next door. Mama, with a “thin white scar” peeking out of her bikini, smokes and offers her daughter useless advice. The girl keeps going back into the house for her Coppertone and “leftover bacon and canned biscuits.” As the sun rises higher, they speculate about whether they are “ready to flip.” A local stoner comes by to admire the mother. Her daughter thinks about “Mama’s spelling-casting eyes” and the “hold they had on TJ Frazier” and in one of those examples of how Monks’s sentences don’t necessarily go where you’d expect them to, the daughter experiences “a surge of power” inside herself “like a burning tornado.”

  But when the young girl finds herself sweating in a baking hot backseat on her way to the pool with the two young men, who are the uncles of her best friend, the sexual tension and self-consciousness are so strong that they become indistinguishable from the reader’s own memories of adolescence. When one man insists that she sit on his lap, that feeling of power fades, and the girl hears instead “the sound of a star swallowing its own planet.”

  “Nympho” is another story that delves into the heart of American adolescence and has a contemporary appeal. But in this story, an adolescent boy’s ill-considered remark about a girl, instead of destroying her reputation, allows him to confront a bully. This is both one of Monks’s funniest stories as well as one that belongs in her land of “monsters”—if that term can be broadened to include the unusual, the vividly real, the unanticipated.

  Monks examines the exploitation too often suffered by the economically disadvantaged, as when she portrays a moment from the 1960s when a mother on food stamps hears Lyndon B. Johnson on TV, giving his famous speech about the “Great Society” while a grocer is just about to cheat her out of the full value of her food stamps. Grocers don’t fare well in Monks’s tales. They may be stand-ins for economic exploitation in all its forms, since the mine owners and bosses never appear. In fact, except for the miner in a single story, few of Monks’s impoverished characters appear to work. It’s a feature of their economic immobility, and a tribute to Monks’s talent that she moves between socioeconomic realms with honesty and conviction. We trust her eye regardless of where it comes to rest.

  By the time the reader reaches the final story in the collection, the title story, she is apt to feel she has seen a few of the monsters that inhabit Appalachia and is ready for one more. This story is perhaps the most surprising turn taken by Monks in a collection rife with the unexpected. In it, she uses the book of Revelation to invoke the monsters that populate the imaginations of any serious reader of the Bible, and perhaps takes aim at the religious beliefs that offer so little solace to the poor people in her stories. At least, that’s one way of thinking about a magical realist—even surreal—story that has found its way into a collection which, until this point, has been comprised mostly of skillfully realist fiction.

  And yet, Sheryl Monks’s vivid and remarkable imagery has already unsettled our imaginations and prepared us for this moment. It seems the proper capstone of a collection filled with surprises yet capable of making us share some of life’s most wrenching moments without regret.

  R. T. Both is a doctoral student in fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and articles have been published in magazines, journals, and newspapers that include the Brooklyn Review, Cream City Review, Weep, Chicago Magazine, and the Sunday Milwaukee Journal.

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