Word: coal
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Hill's novel also features subterranean action, in coal shafts both employed and abandoned. He blends earnest depiction of working-class culture, subtle glimpses of the corrosive effect of crime on victims and perpetrators, a doomed romance between a miner and a police official's college teacher wife, a series of comic set pieces starring the official's bullying superior, and a whole slew of secrets unwisely unearthed. The daring mingling of genres works rather better than the cluttered plot. Most memorable are the scenes of the central character, a wilder version of the bright boy who is the schoolteacher...
EVERY SUNDAY MORNING DAVID Nelson's family attends church on nearby Williams Mountain, where his father Larry, a coal miner, was born 39 years ago. Inside the small Advent Christian church that his father and mother Joy, 36, helped build, David joins his brother Stephen, 7, and his sister Nancy, 13, in a Bible class. Later in the day, the family drives an hour and 15 minutes to another Advent Christian church at the top of a distant and twisting hollow. David's parents, who are licensed to preach, lead the service, which lasts nearly two hours...
Prenter, W. Va., where David lives, is a tiny coal camp of a town some 40 miles and a mountain pass south of Charleston. A single paved street runs through the town. One-story look-alike houses with green shutters, rickety porches and peeling paint are squeezed between the road and the steep hills. No traffic light. No police station. No firehouse. No school. That is ten miles down the road, where Prenter Creek empties into Big Coal River...
...David Nelson, a pudgy, serious, persistent boy, there was never any question that he would be a coal miner like his dad, who came back from Viet Nam in 1971 and followed his father and grandfather into the coal mines. When David was younger, Larry took him for his first look at the mines. "He was ridin' me around," David recalls, "and I looked up and there was this big ! mountain covered with coal. I thought about working there someday...
...choice is more than a mere wanting. It is a profound longing, a matter of identity. David's younger brother Stephen wants only to play football for West Virginia and go on from there to play professionally, even if it means leaving the hills and the coal mines. David wants his father's identity, his land and context...