“When Pemberton returned to the North Carolina mountains after three months in Boston settling his father’s estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a young woman pregnant with Pemberton’s child. She was accompanied by her father, who carried beneath his shabby frock coat a bowie knife sharpened with great attentiveness earlier that morning so it would plunge as deep as possible into Pemberton’s heart.”
From that moment on, the reader is thrown into a world unlike any I have ever visited. Knowing virtually nothing about Appalachia or the people that hail from that region, simply meeting the characters and their culture was interesting enough. Add the element of environmental destruction via The Boston Lumber Co. and innocent lives in danger and what you end up with is a novel wracked with one startling event after another.
It is clear early on that Serena and Pemberton are to be viewed as the ultimate power-couple. He is the one in charge but it doesn't take long to see that she is calling all the shots.While he seems to believe that he has ingratiated himself by getting down and working with them a time or two, his inability to even recall the name of the girl he has impregnated illustrates his overall carelessness of the people who work for him.
And work they do....filled with harrowing descriptions of the dangers and perils of the logging industry, Rash describes an environment filled with a multitude of fears; snapping cables, wayward axes, frostbite and snakebites. These weary workers endure hellish conditions six days a week in all types of weather. Accident upon accident ensures that employees are constantly killed or mangled. "If you could gather up all the severed body parts and sew them together, you'd gain an extra worker every month.", the doctor morbidly proclaims. But as the Depression soldiers on, the camp is never lacking in willing bodies to work.
The book progresses as Serena and her husband work diligently to make sure plans for a National Park do not come to fruition, knocking off anyone who stands in their way. As the bodies pile up, Rash manages to keep the tone terrifying without ever being overly graphic...most of the murders take place off the page and are simply talked about later. But when Serena sets her sights on Rachel (the mother of Pemberton's child) and her son Jacob, it all takes a bone-chilling turn. By the time Rachel and her son begin fleeing for their lives, the cold-blooded ways of the ironically named Serena had me so bewildered and flabbergasted that I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. Serena quickly establishes herself as a disturbing and intense villain, though even at her worst I was captivated. Unlike Lady Macbeth, however, blood stained hands are not a cause for guilt and certainly no reason for pause....a conscience, Serena does not have.
I think the best part of this novel was the way it was set up. It seemed odd to me at first the character for which the book was named, is not front and center at all times....or that the story was not told from her perspective. We never really get to know Pemberton although a few short glimpses of human decency do flicker through right before being snuffed out by an unsettling loyalty to his wife. For me, it seemed that the unifier of the many plot lines came via the lunchtime conversations of the lead logging crew. Their simple and yet often profound discussions served to offer comic relief along with sage wisdom. Additionally, these conversation gave depth to characters that were no more than bystanders to the mayhem around them. They simultaneously lent a hand to the characterization not only of the people of the area but of the time. As they quietly go about their daily business, they are all too aware of the underlying danger that Serena represents and they keenly understand what she is capable of. As one sagely states, “I’d no more strut up and tangle with that eagle than I’d tangle with the one what can tame such a critter”, referring to the eagle that Serena has managed to tame and is rarely seen without."
If all the mayhem, murders and chaos sounds like alot, trust me it is. The final culmination of it all is as riveting as the rest of the ride and leaves nothing left to question. Ron Rash's use of elegant language and graceful descriptions weave together themes of greed, lust, and conservation in a story sure to stay with you once the final page has been turned.
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