Allegheny Front

March 7, 2016
The deceptively powerful stories in Null’s first collection, after his debut novel, Honey from the Lion, create a map not only of the geography of rural West Virginia but also of its people. These are characters inhabiting places largely ignored by the outside world. In “Mates,” a man kills an endangered bald eagle on his land, believing himself to be above the law, and is then stalked and tormented by the eagle’s mate. In “Gauley Season,” a group of ex-miners turn to operating rafting companies after their mining jobs disappear, but the promising new industry quickly leads to tragedy. The rugged lives of a group of log drivers in the late 1800s are chronicled in “The Slow Lean of Time.” In the astonishing “Telemetry,” a young scientist’s camp on Back Allegheny Mountain is visited by a local man and his daughter, their presence forcing the scientist to confront her relationship to her own origins, which becomes a recurring theme in the collection. Violence is inevitable in these stories—guns are almost always present, and they aren’t just decoration—but there is plenty of beauty, too. Landscape is an essential element, as well as the constant presence of wild animals, but Null focuses on the ways that a setting can shape how we identify with the world. The scope of the collection contains voices from multiple generations, and the result is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a distinctive region of North America, as well as an exercise in finding the universal in the particular.

Starred review from March 1, 2016
Sometimes lyrical, sometimes scarifying stories by the up-and-coming author of Honey from the Lion (2015). What happens to a body when it's been dumped in the woods under a loose pile of leaves? Maybe you don't want to know the details, and perhaps it's enough to say, as Null does, that "the bears and the foxes broke him apart and scattered him far and near," language tender and elegant enough to serve in a Scottish border ballad by way of Appalachia. Null does not let that suffice, though: the body of the poor traveling salesman who ventures unwisely into the hollers is more than broken up--gnawed by dogs, half-buried, and worse--outside the confines of the story, ironically titled "Something You Can't Live Without," forgotten but for one thing: its former occupant's wise observation, not long before dying, that "an animal has just enough brains to cure its own hide." Hmmm: cured indeed. Not all the stories in this small collection are bleak and violent, but those are the dominant moods, fitting the severe landscape. Within that setting of crags, foreboding forests, and onrushing creeks, Null finds poetry and moments that can sometimes bear something like grace: "The sky went from indigo to blackness, and he saw nothing ominous in it, nothing but cold stars wheeling in their course, a course determined by the same firm hand he hoped was guiding his own." Whether logging, farming, or damming creeks, the people who inhabit these stories are also mostly at war with each other and certainly at war with the land, which repays them with all sorts of mayhem--but sometimes, as in the closing story, with a bit of dumb luck as well. Breece D'J Pancake gets all the literary press out of West Virginia, what there is of it. But he's been dead nearly 40 years, and it's high time someone else did. Null is a natural writer with much to say.

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May 1, 2016
Nature's rugged and ruthless beauty provides the backdrop for various perspectives and periods in Null's collection, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. The memorable Telemetry follows young scientist Kathryn, whose research brings her back to her childhood landscape amid the Black Allegheny Mountains. Kathryn feels unsettled when an enigmatic local and his young daughter arrive to camp nearby, and as the days progress, she reconciles her current life against memories of her past. In Something You Can't Live Without, a traveling salesman counts on the assumed ignorance of his target customersa poor farmer and his eerie twin sonsto make a sale, ultimately leading to a demise that unexpectedly entwines the destruction of wilderness with human mortality. Mates follows wizened mountaineer Sull, who, after killing a bald eagle, finds himself straddling social expectations and the smaller world he does not want to leave behind. Null's nine detailed tales explore the value of landscapes, both topographical and emotional, as well as the connections one clings to despite imminent wreckage.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)