Books in Brief

National Review, March 24, 2003 by Robert P. George

In the Forest of the Night, by Larry Ellis (iUniverse, 272 pp., $15.95)

A reader who has himself "been there" sometimes simply knows when a writer is "from there." The descriptions are just right: The subtlest shadings, not merely of local landscape, but of facial expressions, dialect and accent, mannerism and gesture, are faithfully rendered. The writer is at home among the people and places he is describing. Larry Ellis is from there; I can tell. "There," in this case, is West Virginia coal country in the 1960s and early 1970s -- hardly the epicenter of the "Age of Aquarius," to be sure; but, for all its remoteness, a place that was not untouched by the social trends that convulsed America.

This is a murder mystery set in the coal fields of Logan County. Jack Sampson is a boy growing up there just as the 1960s hit Appalachia. Handsome, smarter than most, athletically gifted, he sets his sights high - - at a time when the allure of liberation overwhelmed traditional communities almost everywhere by promising young people that truly anything is possible. In Sampson's case, as in most, reality insists on interfering -- tying him to his small town, where he becomes a miner, union official, and police officer, and binding him to the culture into which he has been born. Like his Biblical near namesake, Sampson is a powerful and good man who by a curious and ambiguous route strays -- and whose straying leads to tragedy. Yet in the end, he bears witness to what is permanently true and right.

In spinning his tale, Ellis makes deft use of historical events: a coal- mining disaster, bitter and often violent strikes, a plane crash that killed most of the Marshall University football team in 1970. Near the heart of the mystery is a true-to-life account of the theft of an election for the presidency of the United Mine Workers of America.

There are good guys and bad guys in Ellis's story, but the good guys are never perfect; like other human beings, neither their strength of character nor their wit is always up to challenges life throws their way. At the same time, Ellis doesn't fetishize ambiguity -- moral or otherwise. The good guys may be flawed, yet nowhere does the author invite the absurd inference that good and bad are indistinguishable or merely a matter of "perspective." It is refreshing to read a contemporary novel free of such postmodernist preachments. This is Ellis's first novel; it is an unqualified success. Let's have more. -- Robert P. George