Challenging Appalchia

“Nothing’ll ever fix what’s broken in this town, but it would be nice if they’d at least  get the dead bear out of  the parking lot at Food Country”.

“ The Holiday Inn Express on Richland Skyway seemed like as a good place as any for `Margaret Price to maybe, possibly, stick her finger up a guy’s butthole.”

The above characterises Hampton’s debut collection of 12  tales by turns smart, moving and hilarious takes place in the shadows of the Blue Ridge mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, North Carolina.

Each story is narrated by  or through a character who grew up in those places  from which, we are told, the clever ones escape.

The narrator pretty too young to drink, old enough to know she’s gay, – is hiding from her crush on Colleague Jamie, who is about to leave town.  Jamie  urges Pretty to  make the same move  to “Hippietown” in Ashville. “ Girl, You could be out and proud”.

Pretty’s response is “I picked at a scab on my fat knuckle and shrugged “ proud of what?”.

A young girl, desperate for a way out of her small town, finds support in an unlikely place. A ranger working along the Blue Ridge Parkway realises that the dark side of the job, the all too frequent discovery of dead bodies, has taken its toll on her. Haunted by his past, and his future, a tech sergeant reluctantly spends a night with his enstranged parents before being deployed to Afghanistan. Nearing fifty  and facing medical problems, a woman wonders if her short stint at the local chemical plant is to blame.

In Bloomer it’s election time, 2016, and for Larry an exhausted firefighter , the world is burning in a way unnoticed by rolling news, or his soon-to-be-es-wife. As Trump inches closer to White House, dry air feeds the forest infernos until people in Tennessee are “dying, suffocating in their cars as they tried to escape.

In Frogs, the tenderness of thirtysomething twins Carolyn and Frank contrasts with the affection of those  who chide and hush them at a wildlife workshop. When Carolyn, detecting disdain  in the air, asks he brother “ Are we rednecks” it is meant to hurt.

In Saint,  the speaker leaps   from point to point in her life, before and after the death of her brother  at 23. “You realise  this is a  terrible, terrible thing, to have a saint for a brother”.

F*ckface And Other Stories by Leah Hampton, Henry Halt £25.99, 208 pages.