By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 29)
James A. McLaughlin’s Bearskin reads far better than a first novel. Its power of verse, intricately building plot, moving descriptions of land and imagination, and powerful characters destine it to be one of the summer’s best reads.
The plot centers around Rice Moore, a would-be environmental scientist who took a bad turn, becoming a drug mule for a Mexican cartel, and ending up in a prison south of the border.
After leaving prison, his life takes another bad turn when he enacts vengeance on those who killed his girlfriend. The woman had lured him into his criminal behavior and paid the ultimate price at the hands of the cartel after she became a Drug Enforcement Administration informant.
That’s a lot to pack into a novel that takes place half the continent away, a few months later, when Rice finds himself caretaker of a private preserve abutting the Shenandoah National Park in the heart of Appalachia.
But McLaughlin pulls it off, seamlessly, deftly weaving the past and the present.
Rice has taken an assumed name, Rick Morton, while laying low to avoid the drug cartel’s vengeance at the preserve, where he’s the only human in 1,000 acres or more.
Here, he finds a peace of sorts, though tormented by his brutal memories in prison, his fear of being found out, and the intrigue of meeting a woman, Sara Birkeland, an academic who was his predecessor at the preserve.
When he discovers that Birkeland left the job only after she had been raped and beaten apparently by locals who resented the land being off limits to their bear hunting, it provides more incentive for him to find and punish the perpetrators of bear poaching he had discovered on the land.
If an absorbing plot, interesting characters, and stately but alluring pacing weren’t enough, Bearskin offers immersion into a fascinating natural world where the lines between reality and myth, history and discovery, and spiritual ambiguity meet.
McLaughlin’s mastery of language brings the mountains, the hills and hollers alive. Sunshine doesn’t fall through the window of his cabin, it shouts. The trees on the hillsides don’t bend to the wind, their leaves vibrate like the land revealing itself as sentient, shaking itself from slumber.
His connection to the land and its creatures transcends all knowing, proving that the name of the mountain in Cherokee is real.
According to his website, McLaughlin, a Virginia native living in Utah, is currently working on two novels related to Bearskin and set in Virginia and the American Southwest.
If “Bearskin” is any indication, they should be eagerly awaited.
Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at the Clarion Ledger, is the author of seven books including his latest, Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them.
James A. McLaughlin’s novel Bearskin is Lemuria’s August 2018 selection for our First Editions Club for Fiction.
McLaughlin will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 18 as a participant in the “The Rough South” Southern fiction panel panel at 12:00 p.m. at the Galloway Foundery.
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