To the Bones by Valerie Nieman Katherine Scott Crawford (bio) Valerie Nieman. To the Bones. Morgantown, W.Va.: West Virginia University Press, 2019. 220 pages. Softcover. $19.99. The images in Valerie Nieman's novel To the Bones—dank mine shafts rattling with skeletons, acidic rivers peeling the skin from human faces, gaping head wounds, and more—should make us all want to turn back. This was my first thought, upon reading the jacket copy: Are not the horrors coal mining inflicts upon the American landscape enough, without a hint of zombie? The answer is quick: No. Not nearly enough. Nieman does not take her readers gently into the West Virginia night. She plummets us down mine shafts, walks us through grand and terrifying old houses, sends our cars skidding over lonely mountain roads, hides us in dusty attics, makes us watch characters to whom we've become attached melt before our eyes. Hers is a heart-pounding, cinematic, and multi-layered story. It's the sort of rollercoaster ride you race back to the start of the line for, time and again, because despite a queasy [End Page 115] stomach and your heart in your throat, you're not ready for the thrill to end. From the moment Darrick Brehon, orphan, government auditor and unlikely hero, wakes in a mine shaft filled with dead bodies, to the story's very last line, I was in, too: a community member of hardscrabble Redbird, West Virginia, on the hunt for the truth. How did Darrick end up in that awful crack in the earth? Who were the skeleton dead, recent and otherwise? Did an evil more profligate than acid seep into the water from mining tunnels beneath the town? Why was he now possessed of a dangerous power? And what did the controlling and cryptic Kavanaugh family have to do with any of it? It is to Nieman's storytelling credit that she then introduces sharp and steady Louranna Taylor, a Redbird native and sweepstakes operator on the search for her missing daughter. Louranna is a fighter, tough as her mountain roots, and a well-drawn equal to Darrick and the novel's other central characters, including conflicted ex-Marine Marco DeLucca and persistent local journalist Zadie Person. Nieman mines the interiority of her characters to glance a flashlight's beam off their flinty layers. Characters who so easily could become stock—whether by trade or regional stereotype—are instead revealed to be deeply human. Put them on a quest—to unlock the secrets behind the poisoning of their town, save their family members, and usurp a dangerous, robber-baron-like ruling family—and give it a supernatural twist, and the novel becomes something entirely new and different. My favorite books are those which straddle the genre line, refusing to exist within publishing industry parameters. To the Bones does exactly this, and while one of its genres is certainly [End Page 116] Appalachian literature, it defies expected themes. Take frustrated outsider Darrick, who halfway through the story asks this internal question of his West Virginia compatriots: "How much misery could one place absorb? Disappearances, murders, mine disasters, people dying in a river that might have boiled right out of hell? Why don't people just leave?" This is the question, right? Most Appalachian, regional, and place-based literature in general concerns itself on some level with an unapologetic love of the land. But instead of offering us the land and its beauty, Nieman offers us its people. Like Louranna, who tells Darrick that, "… we still love these hills, more'n you can imagine. We make a home here because it is home, not because it's easy. We grow up learning to fish, hunt ramps, shake down apples. We build our homes in places that don't make economic sense. And we dig coal, because that's what we've done for generations, and there's pride in having the skill and guts to do that even when we know the cost." Louranna, however, is the only character who seems to voice why she stays. If the others have their reasons, they never fully emerge from the dark, and perhaps do...
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