The Lost Language of Home

Books & Bakes Update: Searching for my past in the unfamiliar present of Blood River Witch

Books & Bakes is my read-a-thon raising money for Cake4Kids, an organization that provides birthday cakes to underserved and at-risk children. Every Friday through Labor Day, I’ll be posting reviews and round-ups of what I’ve read and a preview of what I’m reading. Make your pledge here!

I came to Blood River Witch for one particular reason: it’s set in the rural Western Kentucky I still consider to be where I’m from. I rarely see the rolling fields of alfalfa, herds of languid cows, and tiny towns of a couple hundred people that I grew up with in the novels I read or shows I watch. So, it was hard to say no when I came across T. J. Martinson’s new novel.

It may seem odd that nostalgia drove me to pick up an occult thriller that opens with a gutted human corpse crucified upside down in an abandoned tobacco barn — that’s not exactly my experience of my home county. Although, the great Satanic Panic was in full swing during my teenage years. Not long after I left for college, I heard that a rumor had swept through the county that a Satanist cult was planning on snatching kids from the local schools, setting off a rush of panicked parents grabbing their kids out of school early.

When you have that many evangelical churches scattered across the towns and countryside, you’ll have plenty of people ready to see the devil’s hands at work.

In Blood River Witch, Deputy Alicia Moore bears the distrust and scorn of her hometown because of her teenage connection to an early aughts murder of an out-of-state trucker who was tortured, gutted, and crucified by a demon-obsessed classmate. She’s estranged from her father, the former sheriff, whose interrogation of her set off a chain of events that leads the town to whisper of her as the witch of the title. And now, in the present, an anonymous call brings her back to that same abandoned tobacco barn to find her former fiancé, mutilated and crucified.

Is it a copycat? Was there another killer left undiscovered? As Alicia tries to find her way through an investigation her sheriff and the State Police would rather her not be a part of, her role as town scapegoat and suspected villain take an even greater toll on her job, her marriage, and her relationship with her young son.

While the novel is structured as a mystery, the story is fascinated by the long memories of small towns and the way those towns pressure people to conform and belong, to share the same beliefs and long for the same nostalgic past. Oh, and to assign blame and guilt over generations.

Now that part I definitely remember from back home.

It was fun to actually read something that takes place in my old back yard — when you live in a big city, you get used to your home being a stage. Blood River Witch is the first time I’ve ever come across the road I grew up on in a work of fiction. Granted, that road was Highway 641, which isn’t exactly a poetic gift to fiction but I’ll take what I can get.

But part of me felt a little sad, viewing my home through the window of the twenty-first century. I left home for college in 1985 at age 17 and by 18 my accent was already changing under the pressure of private school privilege and my embarrassment of being seen as a hick or hillbilly. Where once I would say tin in reference to both a roof and a number, I began to smooth it out to ten when needed. Those high-pitched border-South vowels of Kentucky flattened and stretched into the mid-Atlantic Southern voice I aspired to so people wouldn’t look at my feet to see if I was wearing shoes.

It wasn’t just my voice, it was what I allowed myself to say. I don’t think it’s quite as bad these days but being from backwoods Kentucky came with certain cultural assumptions of low intelligence and cousin fuckin’. While some of those stereotypes arose from the willful bigotry that comes from being a state that’s biggest regret was not being part of the Confederacy, it’s not an entirely fair thing (even if they did inflict Mitch McConnell on the world). I overcorrected and ran as far as I could from that cultural heritage, settling in D.C. and always being grateful that I could punch down on West Virginia.

These days I can’t even fake the accent I grew up speaking, unless I’m very angry or very drunk. I’m no longer fluent in the language of my home. Parts of it are recognizable to me in Blood River Witch — primarily that deep-seated belief among rural Kentuckians that things were better in the past and that the outside world looks down on them. But the rest, from the formerly dry counties gone wet to the metastasizing MAGA mindset to the ongoing destruction of the opioid epidemic, those are foreign lands to me now.

I’m still from there. I still have family and people I love there. But western Kentucky isn’t who I am anymore, even if I mourn a little all the things I once ran from.

If that sounds like a lot to put on a mystery novel, it is — though Martinson isn’t just doing a genre exercise, he’s obviously interested in all those aspects of what it means to be from that place. This is a highly literary tale of violence and memory, not a simple potboiler. But that’s the fun of reading, you never know what you’re going to find even when you think you know what you’re looking for.

Coming Up

I’m off to a pretty good pace with Books & Bakes, over the weekend I finished my fifth book. My minimum goal is twenty books by Labor Day, which will put our total pledges somewhere over the $2,000 mark.

My initial thought was that if I raised a couple hundred bucks for Cake4Kids that would be a great success for my first year. So, going well past that with about nine weeks to go makes me grateful to those who’ve pledged their support through Books & Bakes. You can find them at seanbuggrealtor.com/books-and-bakes. This whole effort wouldn’t exist without them.

So let’s aim to get that number even higher. There’s still plenty of time to make your pledge and add your name to the list. Visit the web site and make your pledge of $1, $5, or $10 per book. Don’t forget, you can set a cap so if I go wild in the bookshelves during July and August you won’t feel like you’re getting hit with big bill. A read-a-thon should be fun, not stressful.

I’ll be back on Friday with a review of Marisa Kashino’s Best Offer Wins, a very dark comedy about the real estate market in D.C. and what lengths someone may go to to get their dream home. Think Gone Girl in a multi-offer competition for a 5-bedroom, 4-bath upscale colonial. It’s brutal out there.

Until then, grab a book and enjoy reading!