The Risen

July 18, 2016
Ligeia’s disappearance, and the events around it, were never resolved for Eugene, and he is stunned to find her ageless face suddenly appear on the cover of his local newspaper. Now a struggling alcoholic, Eugene was 16 when he first saw Ligeia, swimming nude, during the summer of 1969. Taken by her seemingly otherworldly presence, Eugene and his older brother, Bill, fell under her spell and were pulled into that adventurous summer of free love and experimentation. After Eugene succumbs to her enchantments and a brief romance ensues, a rift develops between the two brothers, who view the cultural changes sweeping America in drastically different ways. Contrary to what the brothers have always believed, Ligeia didn’t just leave town that summer. With her sudden resurrection, the most disturbing questions around what actually happened all those years before sets Eugene out to get the truth from his estranged brother, Bill, now a successful surgeon in the small North Carolina town where they grew up. Rash (Serena) invites readers into the lush Carolina hinterland where blissful innocence and larger cultural currents clash with deep consequences for malleable Eugene. Beyond the propulsion of Rash’s thrilling whodunit plot is his characteristically excellent prose.

July 1, 2016
The latest from prolific poet and fiction writer Rash, a 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist for Serena, provides a damaged man's look back at a long-ago and haunted past.It's 1969. Eugene and his older brother, Bill, who live with their mother and their tyrannical town-doctor grandfather in a small town in western North Carolina, are spending a summer afternoon at their remote fishing hole when they encounter a sylphlike young woman--a "mermaid," she says--who introduces herself as Ligeia. She's from Florida and has been banished to this backwater after a misadventure in a commune, to live with a preacher uncle and his family. She is a miracle of exoticism, an in-this-place unprecedented representative of hippiedom, and the boys immediately sign up for training in free love. The more ambitious and dutiful brother, Bill, already well on his way to the medical career his grandfather has ordained for him, quickly pulls back, but his more impulsive younger brother, smitten, falls into an extended summer romance with Ligeia (to whom he supplies stolen sample packs of the downers she prefers) and embarks in earnest on what will be a more enduring relationship with drink. Flash-forward 46 years: Bill has fulfilled his destiny and become a celebrated surgeon, while Eugene, who once dabbled promisingly with writing, has given it up and devoted himself full-time to alcohol and self-loathing. He lives in exile from his family, having scarred and nearly killed his daughter in a booze-caused crash, and he and Bill are only rarely and tensely in touch. But when a skeleton is found, spilled into the creek after decades shrouded in a blue tarp, the two brothers are forced to wrangle again with each other and with the events of that fateful summer. The novel hits its share of false or clumsy notes, but it's not ruined by them thanks to Rash's sure evocation of the time and place and the complexity and poignancy of his portrait of his protagonist.

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April 15, 2016

In 1969, at a quietly burbling creek near their North Carolina home, 16-year-old Eugene and older brother Bill meet gorgeous, rule-breaking Ligeia, who's visiting from Daytona Beach, FL, and introduces them to the joys of the counterculture--with long-term repercussions. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2016

A disturbing discovery along a creek bed in North Carolina pulls Eugene Matney back into the summer of 1969, when Eugene and his older brother, Bill, fell for a "wild child" from Florida. Eugene was especially mesmerized by this exotic hippie visitor named Ligeia, who introduced the shy teen to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But by the end of summer, Ligeia suddenly disappeared and Eugene had discovered that alcohol was the one true love of his life. Meanwhile, dutiful brother Bill becomes a successful surgeon, following in the footsteps of their tyrannical grandfather. How will the gruesome find in Panther Creek upend their lives? What secrets have been long buried? Rash has sometimes been called a Southern gothic writer, and his nod to Poe in naming his troubled character Ligeia might point that way, along with the portrayal of Nebo, Grandfather Matney's mute, sinister assistant. Though his stories, set mostly in the Southern mountains, have a strong sense of place, his beautifully written fiction transcends any formula. VERDICT Rash is not only a master of suspense, he's one of our finest writers. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/21/16.]--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.