Monsters in Appalachia: Stories - Paperback

by Sheryl Monks (Author)

Includes reading and discussion questions.

Back Jacket

The characters within these fifteen stories are in one way or another staring into the abyss. While some are awaiting redemption, others are fully complicit in their own undoing.

We come upon them in the mountains of West Virginia, in the backyards of rural North Carolina, and at tourist traps along Route 66, where they smolder with hidden desires and struggle to resist the temptations that plague them.

A Melungeon woman has killed her abusive husband and drives by the home of her son's new foster family, hoping to lure the boy back. An elderly couple witnesses the end-times and is forced to hunt monsters if they hope to survive. A young girl "tanning and manning" with her mother and aunt resists being indoctrinated by their ideas about men. A preacher's daughter follows in the footsteps of her backsliding mother as she seduces a man who looks a lot like the devil.

A master of Appalachian dialect and colloquial speech, Monks writes prose that is dark, taut, and muscular, but also beguiling and playful. Monsters in Appalachia is a powerful work of fiction.

Author Biography

Sheryl Monks is the founding editor of Change Seven magazine. Previously, she was the co-owner and editor of Press 53, an independent literary publisher which she helped to establish in Winston-Salem, NC. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte. Her collection of stories, All the Girls in France, was a finalist for the 2013 Hudson Prize sponsored by Black Lawrence Press. Her fiction has been nominated for New Stories from the South and been awarded a Northwest NC Regional Artist's Project Grant and the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award. Work has appeared in Revolution John, Black and Grey Magazine, The Greensboro Review, Writer's Chronicle, Midwestern Gothic, Night Train, storySouth, Regarding Arts and Letters, The Toast, Backwards City Review, Southern Gothic online, Surreal South, Fried Chicken and Coffee, and elsewhere.