Burning Bright by Ron Rash

[kdreid91]

I finished Burning Bright last night. It was a great compilation of short stories! All of them were tragic, but they were all so beautifully written I couldn't put it down. In particular, The Corpse Bird struck me as amazing. It was so appropriate for the season, full of superstition and suspense, and the experience of being a "country bumpkin" living in a "modern" society was spot on. It reminded me of moving from Glen Fork, WV to Huntington, WV and being made to feel like an idiot or less of a person because of how I reasoned and how I spoke. There was one other passagr in particular that really jumped off of the page. It was from the perspective of a musician speaking about the experience of playing his music in a bar:
"Such a lifestyle has its appeals, especially as I look out at the human wreckage filling The Last Chance. One guy has his head on a table, eyes closd, vomit drooling from his mouth. Another pulls out his false teeth and clamps them on the ear of a gal at the next table. An immense woman in a purple jumpsuit is crying while another woman screams at her. And what I'm thinking is it's time to halt all human reproduction. Let God or evolution or whatever put us here in the first place start again from scratch, because this isn't working."
It made me think about how my dad must have felt having a front row seat to human destruction for so many years playing in bars. He had explained to me multiple times that he didn't like drinking because he liked having his inhibitions about him. Id never understood. Drinking amongst my friends and good company every once in a while was always a good time. But whenever it's said like that... well, I guess I can see the perspective he was coming from now.