Nitro Mountain

March 14, 2016
Debut author Johnson has crafted an exquisitely stark and gritty portrait of life in Virginia mining country. Leon is a crass, hard-drinking bluegrass bass player with an unrequited love interest, Jennifer. She has survived childhood sexual abuse and intends to remain adrift while renovating an abandoned inn on Nitro Mountain with Arnett Atkins, an increasingly unstable felon. Arnett has been violent with her, and though she’s terrified, she confides in Leon and begs him to help her poison Arnett. Their plot fails and the tables turn, resulting in disastrous, bloody consequences. Throughout, Johnson’s narrative remains grainy as sandpaper and engages with the dusty country allure of a Ron Rash novel. At the conclusion, Jennifer is no better off than she was at the story’s outset, a minor miracle for such a serpentine novel with so many dark, treacherous edges. Stark and raw, yet relentlessly compelling, Johnson’s hardscrabble characters are awash in alcohol and dirty melodrama, constantly trying to claw their way out of the dingy reality holding them hostage.

March 15, 2016
Appalachian noir at its darkest and most deranged. When a doctor suggests to one of the emotionally (and physically) battered women in this powerfully bleak novel that she may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, she responds bitterly that she's far too young for Vietnam, though the reader recognizes that life in the shadow of the titular Nitro Mountain is its own minefield. Most of these characters have been warped by brutality, abuse, even in-breeding, and the isolated community seems to offer no way to escape or transcend what amounts to a spiritual death sentence. At the core of the novel is a romantic triangle all but devoid of romance. At one corner is Leon, the first-person narrator of the long opening chapter. He's a broken-armed bass player who lives with his dysfunctional parents and makes little more than spare change onstage with a country band. He somehow finds himself attractive enough to quite a few of the novel's women, though, typically, "sex was just two sloppy bodies being tossed against each other." The love of his life, Jennifer, wants what Leon cannot give her and ends up either the lover or the mountain captive of a tattooed video voyeur whose camera monitored the women's bathroom at the town bar. Two of these people conspire to kill the other, though Leon's narration leaves open-ended who will be the killers and who will be the corpse. The second chapter switches to third-person narration (and the present tense) to show the aftermath of whatever happened on Nitro Mountain, where what once was a still for moonshine has given way to a deadly mixture of heroin and speed. It focuses on the songwriter who fronted the band that employed Leon and suggests the possibility of a future denied the others. Chapter 3 is the shortest and saddest, with another shift of narrative perspective and a sense that any glimmer of redemption might just be a mirage. Some of the plainspoken narration is very funny, deadly so, among characters who prefer pain to the numbness of feeling nothing at all. An ambitious, disturbing, and daring debut.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 15, 2016

Johnson's raw first novel is one long, mournful wail, and it can make for tough listening. Hapless Leon can't hold onto a job or his sexy, bad-news sort-of girlfriend, Jennifer. His latest bid for her has led to a car crash and a broken arm that doesn't get in the way of his hiring himself out as bass player for Jones Young, at 30 almost a bluegrass and old-country-music legend in their neck of the woods. Leon meanders to Rachel, then discovers a video camera in the bathroom of a local bar and secretly rats out a dangerous man named Arnett, who ends up as the new, truly abusive man in Jennifer's life. Of course Leon consents to intervene when Jennifer comes pleading for help, though you know it will cost him. As Jones's final song suggests, the bad choices people make in this dark, ugly setting are evidence that they have no choice at all. VERDICT Johnson captures the lives of down-and-outers in remarkably well-crafted language. Yet despite some strong scenes, the narrative finally misses the tragic dimension of a Daniel Woodrell or Donald Ray Pollock work, making this just one more sorry tale. [See Prepub Alert, 11/9/15.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.