People Constructed of Pain and Grief

a review by Jim Coby

Wiley Cash. When Ghosts Come Home: A Novel. William Morrow, 2021.

JIM COBY grew up in Alabama and is an Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University Kokomo. He is the editor in chief of IU Kokomo’s student journal Field: A Journal of Arts and Sciences. He has reviewed regularly for NCLR. Read his interview with Cash in the 2022 print issue.

WILEY CASH is the author of four novels, the previous two reviewed in NCLR Online 2015 and 2018. He talks about his first novel in an interview in NCLR 2013. He is a professor at UNC Asheville where he teaches fiction writing and literature. He currently resides in North Carolina with his wife and daughters. Read an interview with him in NCLR 2013 and another in the 2022 print issue. New York Times bestselling author Wiley Cash has previously published novels exploring fundamentalist religions, family dynamics, recording the lengths to which an estranged father will go to reach his children, and reimagining labor disputes of the early twentieth century in the mill towns near Gastonia, NC. In his newest, and arguably best novel, When Ghosts Come Home, Cash continues his streak of notable stories with a literary thriller that grapples with institutionalized racism and violence, policing practices, and the psychological and emotional tumult of losing a child, all while a vexing and haunting murder unfolds in the background.

The novel begins on October 30, 1984, with an atmosphere very much like a classic thriller – ambiance, secrecy, and a latent, lurking malevolence seemingly around each corner and waiting to be released. From that haunted evening, three parallel narrative threads emerge. Winston Barnes, the sheriff of the small community of Oak Island, NC, investigates a mysterious Mischief Night plane crash that leaves community figurehead Rodney Bellamy dead in its wake. Barnes also navigates his home life as his wife Marie struggles with cancer. Next, we follow Bellamy’s nephew as he navigates the vexing world of matriculating to a new high school and grappling with small-town racism after his parents send him to live with his sister Janelle following a shoplifting incident in his native Atlanta. The final thread revolves around Winston’s daughter Colleen who is reeling from the loss of a child and retreats from her home in Dallas to Oak Island to seek refuge among the sights, sounds, and people with whom she is most intimately familiar. As each of these characters continues their journeys, their lives become increasingly entangled until acts of shocking violence evince the ways in which everything connects to everything else in small Southern towns.

Cash has always shown himself to be a gifted author of place, and this trend continues within his latest novel. Rather than dealing with Appalachia or Piedmont regions of North Carolina as he has in his previous books, he instead turns his attention to the coastal Oak Island, which he describes as “a place that had either gone undiscovered or had been forgotten by the rest of the state” (13). From its first pages, When Ghosts Come Home inundates the reader with a sense of uneasiness and loneliness. Despite characters readily traveling to Oak Island from locales like Miami, Dallas, and Wilmington, the setting feels completely isolated and removed –claustrophobic in its very openness. This sense is amplified by the constant reminders of autumnal weather and the fact that restaurants and tourist spots have closed down for the season, as their patrons have all fled for warmer climates. “As fall turned toward winter,” Cash writes, “the island always seemed to grow smaller, more remote, more insular” (13), and we as readers

COURTESY OF PBS NORTH CAROLINA

– and witnesses – feel the walls closing in on us as well.

Given the dark subject matter of this novel, Cash strikes a remarkable balance in crafting a text that walks the tightrope of appealing to our more prurient curiosities, while also allowing for some light to peek through the cracks. There’s no shortage of trauma and violence, to be sure, but what readers leave this novel with is not so much horror at the reflections of our world, as a deep appreciation for the intractable kindness that refuses to leave even during the worst of times, for the small mercies that we grant one another. For example, throughout the novel, Colleen, a character “constructed of pain and grief” (29), finds herself haunted by the stillborn death of her child. As a means of both confronting her grief and measuring time in her liminal world, she is constantly consulting a child care manual to learn approximately what developmental stage her child would be experiencing had they lived. The manual provides Colleen a temporal framework from when days and weeks muddle together and time becomes incalculable. It is not the consultation of her manual that provides her the greatest relief from anxiety but her interactions with others in her community who have likewise experienced loss. Late in the novel, Colleen visits Janelle Bellamy’s home, where the two recount their memories of Rodney and where Colleen has the opportunity to hold Janelle’s newborn child. Remarkably, a simple request becomes laden with the weight of the goodness that each woman is providing the other – Colleen relieving Janelle, however briefly, of a chore, and Janelle providing Colleen the opportunity to feel a newborn child close to her. Such tenderness, such instances of minor but profound kindness allow Cash’s novel to delve into the darkness of this world, while reminding readers that kindness exists alongside it.

If Wiley Cash’s new novel, When Ghosts Come Home, didn’t so well encapsulate the myriad universal tumults of aging, fear, and loss, then it might well be described as the perfect encapsulation of the year 2020. Despite the 1980s setting, the novel is animated by the anxieties of our collective recent past: loss of family, reckonings with racial injustice past and present, a high-stakes election, and the belief that such concerns are beyond one’s control. But even with these pressing and weighty concerns, the novel moves with the rapidity of the most well-plotted thriller, and readers will hardly be able to set the novel down once they’ve picked it up. n