Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

by Sharyn McCrumb

Overview

"In an earlier life, McCrumb must have been a balladeer, singing of restless spirits, star-crossed lovers, and the consoling beauty of nature. . . . The overall effect is spellbinding."
—The Washington Post

Bestselling author Sharyn McCrumb is "a born storyteller" (Mary Higgins Clark) who astonishes readers and reviewers with the power and scope of her talent, prompting the San Diego Union-Tribune to declare: "There is no one quite like her among present-day writers. No one better, either."

Foggy Mountain Breakdown, the first-ever collection of Sharyn McCrumb's short fiction, is a literary quilting of old and new, humorous and heartfelt, offering award-winning works—and two stories never before published, contrasting mountain childhoods past and present.

Chilling tales of suspense alternate with evocative character portraits and compelling narratives that embrace the southern Appalachian locales and themes of McCrumb's acclaimed Ballad Novels. Within this cornucopia of two dozen stories, Old Rattler, a mountain healer, skirmishes with a serial killer . . . Princess Di investigates long-kept secrets within the House of Windsor . . . A reincarnated murder victim seeks delicious revenge . . . And while honeymooning in the bridegroom's ancestral hilltop homeplace, two newlyweds harbor second thoughts.

The author's perfect-pitch ear for dialogue and ability to illuminate the dark side of human nature merge with her brilliant artistry to make Foggy Mountain Breakdown a virtuoso collection for devotees of Sharyn McCrumb—and for the legion of new readers who will find themselves caught under her spell.  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345414946
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/28/1998
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	4.18(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Sharyn McCrumb is an internationally acclaimed New York Times bestselling author whose work has been honored with all five of the major awards in crime fiction (Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Nero)—and two Best Appalachian Novel awards.  She is the creator of the Ballad Novel series, which began with If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy O. The most recent installment in her satirical mystery series featuring forensic anthropologist Elizabeth MacPherson is If I'd Killed Him When I Met  Him... .

Ms. McCrumb lives in the Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains.with her husband David and their two younger children, less than a hundred miles from the Smoky Mountain valley where her ancestors settled in 1790.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION
 
 I COME FROM a race of storytellers. My father's family-the Arrowoods and the McCourys settled in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina in 1790, when the wilderness was still Indian country. They came from the north of England and from Scotland, and they seemed to want mountains, land, and as few neighbors as possible.
 
The first of the McCourys to settle in America was my great-great-great-grandfather Malcolm McCoury, a Scot who was kidnapped as a child from the island of Islay in the Hebrides in 1750, and made to serve as a cabin boy on a sailing ship. He later became an attorney in Morristown, New Jersey; fought with the Morris Militia in the American Revolution; and finally settled in what is now Mitchell County, western North Carolina, in 1794. Yet another "connection" (a distant cousin) is the convicted murderess Frankie Silver (1813-1833), who was the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina.
 
I grew up listening to my father's tales of World War II in the Pacific, and to older family stories of duels and of escapades in Model T Fords. With such adventurers in my background, I grew up seeing the world as a wild and exciting place; the quiet tales of suburban angst so popular in modern fiction are Martian to me.
 
Storytelling is an art form that I learned early on. When I was a little girl, my father would come in to tell me a bedtime story, which usually began with a phrase like "Once there was.a prince named Paris, whose father was Priam, the king of, Troy...." Thus I got The Iliad in nightly installments, geared to the level of a four-year old's understanding. I grew up in a swirl of tales: the classics retold; ballads or country songs, each having a melody, but above all a plot; and family stories about Civil War soldiers, train wrecks, and lost silver mines.
 
My mother contributed stories of her grandfather, John Burdette Taylor, who had been a sixteen-year-old private in the 68th North Carolina Rangers (CSA). His regiment had walked in ragbound boots, following the railroad tracks, from Virginia to Fort Fisher, site of a decisive North Carolina battle. All his life he would remember leaving footprints of blood in the snow as he marched. When John Taylor returned home to Carteret County, southeastern North Carolina, at the end of the war, his mother, who was recovering from typhoid, got up out of her sickbed to attend the welcome home party for her son. She died that night.
 
My father's family fund of Civil War stories involved great-great-uncles in western North Carolina who had discovered a silver mine or a valley of ginseng while roaming the hills, trying to escape conscription into one marauding army or the other. There were the two sides of the South embodied in my parents' oral histories: Mother's family represented the flatland South, steeped in its magnolia myths, replete with Gorham sterling silver and Wedgwood china. My father's kinfolks spoke for the Appalachian South, where the pioneer spirit took root. In their War between the States, the Cause was somebody else's business, and the war was a deadly struggle between neighbors. I could not belong completely to either of these Souths because I am inextricably a part of both.
 
This duality of my childhood, a sense of having a foot in two cultures, gave me that sense of otherness that one often finds in writers: the feeling of being an outsider, observing one's surroundings, and looking even at personal events at one remove.
 
So .much conflict; so much drama; and two sides to everything. Stories, I learned, involved character, and drama, and they always centered around irrevocable events that mattered.
 
This book is a collection of almost all the short stories I have ever written. Some of them are serious character studies ("A Predatory Woman," "Among My Souvenirs," ''The Matchmaker"); some are sad stories set in the Southern mountains ("Precious Jewel," ''Telling the Bees," "Old Rattler"); and some are whimsical tales of fantasy and humor ("An Autumn Migration," "Remains to Be Seen," "Nine Lives to Live"). The difference in styles reflects the duality in my nature: Mountain versus Southern, Daddy's side versus Mother's side. I like to think that both of them win.
 
The earliest story in the collection, "Love on First Bounce," is a semidocumentary of my adolescence in a small Southern town, and the first draft was written when I was in high school. It marks the first appearance of Elizabeth MacPherson, the heroine of many of my novels. I hear her voice, too, in the narrator of "Southern Comfort." Compare the sunny life of that suburban child to the dark, spartan boyhood described in "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," which is a portrait of my father's youth in the Tennessee mountains.
 
Sometimes when I write short stories I set myself a task. "Precious Jewel," based on my father's family, was an attempt to see if I could write a short story in which the most vivid character does not appear: Addie McCrory is dead when the narrative begins. "John Knox in Paradise" is the old Scots Border tale of Thomas the Rhymer, 'retold in modem terms, with True Thomas and his captor the Queen ofElfland recast as a modem Scot and a young American woman.
 
The ideas came from many different places: from correspondence with a reader I've never met ("Gentle Reader"); from something I saw that triggered an idea ("Remains to Be Seen"-the mummy described in the story really was on display in an army surplus store in North Carolina years ago); from a newspaper article ("Not All Brides Are Beautiful," my cynical reaction to the wedding of an inmate on Virginia's death row).
 
No matter where the ideas originate, though, they are all filtered through my own split perception, to be sorted into "Southern" or "Mountain." If I had to pick out one common thread present in each of these vastly different stories, I would say that it is this: in every single story, there is someone who feels like a stranger.
 

What People are Saying About This

Mary Higgins Clark

Sharyn McCrumb is a born storyteller!

Interviews

My short stories tend to be more autobiographical than my novels. In this collection of almost every short story I have ever written, you will find little slices of my life, interspersed with that ever-present writer's question: What if? 'The Witness' and 'Precious Jewel' are Appalachian stories about my Tennessee grandfather, whose real name was Spencer Arrowood, namesake of the sheriff in my Ballad novels. 'Love at First Bounce' chronicles my adolescence in Greenville, North Carolina, and 'Gentle Reader' was inspired by correspondence with a faithful but mysterious reader of my novels. The mummy in 'Remains to Be Seen' really did reside on the top shelf of an Army surplus store in North Carolina, and everything about the royal family in 'The Monster of Glamis' is true, except the letter itself. I see short stories as shining stones that a writer pulls out of the depths of the subconscious. Like dreams, they tell us who we are and what we think.
—Sharyn McCrumb

Editorial Reviews

Not many mystery writers use story collections as crossover books, but McCrumb's versatility in novels as different as Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992) and The Rosewood Casket (1996) makes the transition here seem inevitable. Though most of the 24 tales take some form easily recognizable to McCrumb's large following—the elegiac southern memoir, the astringently ironic anecdote, the updated folktale—the forms themselves are whimsically diverse. The common thread certainly isn't mystery: There's only one orthodox whodunit ("Happiness Is a Dead Poet," a delicious tale of literary politics) and one coming-of-age story featuring McCrumb's regular sleuth, Elizabeth MacPherson—but a sad sense of past oppression and injustice that, in the most characteristic stories ("The Luncheon," "Gentle Reader," "Not All Brides Are Beautiful"), curdles to civilized rage.

No particular standouts—McCrumb really needs the novel length to shine—but a revealing sketchbook of two dozen tales exploring the quicksilver border between mystery and magic.

Kirkus Reviews

Multiple narrators bring a variety of delivery, vocal tone, and accents to seven short stories set in southern Appalachian locales. The narration is clear, often slightly accented, with easily distinguishable characters. Soft, sometimes melancholy, jazz music serves as breaks between stories. The last story, about a mystery writer and a fan, has two narrators and is exceptional. The fan’s characterization is reminiscent of a gangster; the mystery writer sounds crisp and businesslike in the beginning before she evolves into a warm, gentle personality--who ends up in a shocking situation. An additional story, about Clutey Campbell’s senior group and its Wicca spells, is laugh-out-loud funny. This production is great for quick trips. G.D.W. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

DEC 06/JAN 07 - AudioFile