If the Creek Don’t Rise by Leah Weiss, book review: It unfolds like a dark, gripping alt-country ballad
Appalachia, the huge mountainous region stretching across 13 states from southern New York to northern Mississippi - home to a sizeable chunk of America’s white rural poor - occupies a distinctive if culturally under-represented place in that country’s imagination. Populated by around 25 million people, about eight per cent of the US population – many descended from the Scots-Irish settlers who emigrated there in the 18th century – it has inspired works as diverse as John Boorman’s Deliverance and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Like ‘the West’ or ‘the South’, it’s an evocative, mythic space.
Like Daniel Woodrell’s ‘hillbilly noir’ novel Winter’s Bone - adapted into a tremendous backwoods thriller starring a then unknown Jennifer Lawrence - Leah Weiss’s Appalachia-set fiction debut unfolds like a dark, gripping alt-country ballad. Told with a kind of inquisitive Gothic realism, the story opens with its heroine, Sadie Blue - a pregnant teenager in the 70s North Carolina backwater of Baines Creek - being savagely beaten. Only weeks into her marriage to the local lothario-cum-sociopath, she exists in a world where men’s cruelty can be partly explained by them being raised by “mamas who loved men more than their babies”.
Doomed romance, violence and dysfunctional families are grist to the mill in this “piss and vinegar” redneck world, but Weiss wrongfoots expectations early on by moving inside the heads of a range of characters, from the local preacher to a school teacher who moves to the town from the city. Sadie Blue’s story is just one among many in a tale set in what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America”, in which women are almost as morally compromised as the men.
As with any writing set in this world, it’s something of a high-wire act fraught with the perils of falling into peckerwood pastiche and caricature. The first-person voices of the town’s populace ring with a vernacular similar to works of Southern fiction by the likes of Cormac McCarthy, but have their own inventive quality, rather than being ensnared in stereotypes. It’s a difficult trick to pull off, particularly for a first-time novelist, and the novel deserves to gain broader, crossover appeal for this alone.
The novel is loosely a feminist revenge drama, with sadistic, hapless men being served rough - and comic - justice by women ground down by misogyny. The ostensible bleakness of that theme is, however, couched in a deadpan wryness that precludes a descent into miserabilist ‘realism’. The technique of moving into the minds of a cast of different personalities gives the book a filmic, rounded feel. The climax, when it comes, feels earned but doesn’t occur quite as expected. It’s a satisfyingly strange confection.
'If the Creek Don’t Rise' by Leah Weiss is published by Sourcebooks Landmark, £11.99
