The Angels of Sinkhole County

Deborah Clearman | New Meridian Arts Press 259p, trade paper, ISBN 979-8-988-02341-8

This darkly comic novel of death and class in the hollows and high places of rural West Virginia centers on the caretakers of the “The Major,” Roger Thorndike, who dies alone on his 360 acre estate, his family living their lives elsewhere. Fearing the loss of their jobs in a region that’s already struggling, the women on staff hatch a “preposterous charade” to conceal the death and swap the Major out for a mountain man who happens to be his spitting image. Better still: the double, a patient of schemer Loretta Hardwick, can’t speak, making it easier to pass him off to the town and the Major’s adult children, who only visit sporadically. Each woman has her own reason for engaging in this deception—and once they spot the obvious truth, The Major’s children, it turns out, have reasons of their own for electing to go along with it.

While the setup has a comic power, and Clearman (author of Remedios and others) offers much amusing regional dialogue, The Angels of

Sinkhole County unfolds in a pained minor key, as it digs into desperation and pain that could lead people to make these sad, desperate choices. Clearman dramatizes the lives of the caretakers and their families, as well as the Major’s children, who face emotional struggles of their own. These characters, though, are too caught up in their own struggles to exhibit similar empathy, for the elderly double at the center of the story or to wonder who he was before illness and age took his dignity and identity.

Some characterization edges toward the archetypal, as the littleeducated mountain poor strive to trick the aloof rich, but Clearman has a sharp eye for detail, irony, and life as it’s lived. The novel’s unsentimental approach feels rooted not in mockery but in deep concern with the most dehumanizing aspects of the economic imperatives of American life.

Cover: B+ | Design & typography: A | Illustrations: – Editing: A | Marketing copy: A