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Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Eleven Stories

by Peter Neofotis

Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Eleven Stories Cover

ISBN13: 9780312537371
ISBN10: 0312537379
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

In the places set between folds in the Earth, voices echo against mountains... So begins the story of Concord, Virginia, one of those places set between folds in the Earth. It's a place like almost any other Southern town, filled with self-righteous preachers, descendants of slaves, upstanding town leaders, and the ladies of the local bridge club. But Concord has something else: a dark heart. A church has been abandoned. Vultures have been roosting in the trees at George MacJenkins's house. Poisonous snakes follow Rachel Stetson into the river for a swim. And the ghost of Thomas Jefferson has recently spoken through a man chained to fate. Deftly spinning a web of stories from the voices of the town, Peter Neofotis creates a captivating portrait---comic, dramatic, bombastic, and tragic---of a place trapped in time and possessed by the valley landscape that surrounds it. In the tradition of great Southern gothic writing, Peter Neofotis brings to life the town of Concord, Virginia, allowing even the ancient voices there to swirl through the glazed brick streets like the Fork River. It's a pulse-raising debut by a writer who's created a place the reader will never forget.

Review:

"This colorful debut collection consists of 11 interlinked stories set in a fictitious Shenandoah Valley town between the early 1950s and late '70s. The stories exhibit an Appalachian Gothic vibe, and their outlandish, often violent plots draw on the antics of the local eccentrics. The book kicks off with 'The Vultures,' in which George MacJenkins returns from vacation to find dozens of vultures have turned his home into their grotesque roost. Local reporter Rachel Stetson features in a couple stories, interviewing a religious snake handler in one, reporting on 'the town fool' in the next. In 'The Builders,' Tom Dorian, an African-American carpenter married to a woman from a white trash family, is chained to a bridge by bigoted locals and has a very strange encounter with Mary Anne Randolph, 'a haunted albino.' Elsewhere, the 1968 trial of two gay men for sodomy in 'The Botanist' offers a few humorous moments. Neofotis smartly captures a sometimes creepy, sometimes beautiful corner of Americana." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Synopsis:

Concord, Virginia, is almost like any other Southern town filled with self-righteous preachers, descendents of slaves, upstanding town leaders and Bridge Club ladies. But Concord has something else: a dark heart. A church has been abandoned. Vultures have been roosting in the trees at George MacJenkins house. Poisonous snakes followed Rachel Stetson into the river for a swim. And the ghost of Thomas Jefferson has recently spoken through a man chained to fate. In the tradition of great Southern gothic writing, Peter Neofotis takes you inside Concord, Virginia and allows its ancient voices to swirl through the streets like the Fork River, raising your pulse and creating a place you can never forget.

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RochelleLee, September 28, 2009 (view all comments by RochelleLee)
Part history, part mythology, and part just good old gossip - Concord, Virginia brings to mind the intricacies and charm of small town life brought forth in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Lee Edger Master’s Spoon River Anthology - yet instilled with southern Gothic flair. With colorful illustrations of character and breathtaking descriptions of the landscape this “small town guarded by blue-limestone forested masses” is a place where “a tale - like a ghost - can reverberate off the weathered hills.” Raised in historic Lexington, Virginia, Neofotis draws on the rich American heritage that blankets Shenandoah to create his mythical town. As we enter and leave the homes and minds of Concord’s townsfolk, one feels as if they actually exist, and its magicians have cast their spells.
And the magic of these remarkable tales is that they pay tribute to a wide swath of history and literature, while still taking on an original life of their own. Through the evocation of historical memory, Neofotis’s stories deftly travel from seemingly incongruous destinations such as the American Southwest to the battlefields of the Korean War. And whereas most of the conflicts portrayed in Winesburg, Ohio are internal, Concord, Virginia evokes a cohesive sense of community through its exploration of external human conflict brought about by internal prejudices. The stories are at once plot driven fairy tales set in a fictitious southern town, and complex illustrations of the American protagonist.
Perhaps the best example of this lies within the story titled The Snake Man. The Snake Man features Concord’s lone Korean War Vet, from the perspective of a small town reporter. The reporter travels with him a canoe ride, a kind of Appalachian mountain-river Odyssey, reckoning with giant snakes, pollution, and the memories of Korea, which seems timely as America is once again involved in an invasive war. Taking place shortly after “a bus load of boys was just drafted” for Vietnam, the story resonates today when the reporter asks Sammy, “So what do I say to the sons of Virginia being sent to Vietnam?” and “Sammy looked at her, with the red sun behind him. ‘Your not going to go over there and just blow your guns. It’s war. And you know what? The worst part of it all is coming home and feeling abandoned. Like all that murder meant nothing.’” Not only does the story ask us to learn from wars past, but it also serves as a strong rebuttal to novels such as Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, which spawned two films and perpetuated the defacing myth that Korean War vets were “brain-washed Americans.”

Combining classical mythology with the harrows of American history, Neofotis’s seventh story, The Builders, is a powerful drama of both historical and contemporary race relations and misogyny in America. Woven with lines from Thomas Jefferson’s writings and letters, bird songs, and night-swimming memories, the story of the African-American Tom Dorian, chained to the Natural Bridge of Virginia, is told through a series of hallucinations and trials with an albino woman. When the ghost of Thomas Jefferson challengers the albino woman for believing in the miracles of Jesus, just as she believes in peace between black and white, both hopes that are “beyond the realm of possibilities,” she counters by throwing back Jefferson’s most prized phrase, “Sort of like all men are created equal.” She then proceeds to threaten Jefferson with eternal damnation, using against him more of his own words and rocks from Virginia’s Natural Bridge, which he at one time owned. An American Prometheus Bound story, The Builders asks provocative questions about our nation’s forefathers and the meaning of the founders of America.

Concord, Virginia moves beyond American History with stories like The Strangers, which tells the story of a Gypsy woman and Jewish man, both survivors of the Holocaust, who find solace together floating “in the current of that full deep-blue water” of the Fork River. Curiously, the story mentions that while lying of the rocks reading, the Gypsy is reading Eudora Welty’s The Wide Net. It is an ironic mention as the woman feared dead in The Wide Net is speculated to have been carried off by “Gypsies...kidnappers since the world began,” whom “She was always scared of.” It is also ironic because The Wide Net and The Strangers mirror each other as tales. The Wide Net tells of a man searching for his past and suicidal wife of many years in a river. The Strangers, on the other hand, tells of an old couple having found each other and seeking to forget their past through the mediative waters of a river. Both stories show the influence of nature’s beauty on love.

In the final story, The Ancients, Neofotis displays his liking for mythology with the folksiness that enlivens some of this other stories like The Heiress. The tale tells of a very old moon-shiner, named Old Lady MacJenkins, defending her land from developers with magical concoctions and a collection of delightfully violent giant dogs. In an era of great financial, and in particular, real estate instability, this story rings resonant for many. The drowning of a home to make way for a dam recalls Robert Penn Warren’s Flood: A Romance of our Time. Yet while Warren’s book is about a town that drowns in its own insularity, Neofotis’s work is about the death of something more idealized. For the story’s main character, Old Lady MacJenkins, was “the oldest person in town, and had been for as long as anyone could remember.” Her final eulogy, delivered when she is well over 100 years old, is a poignant, haunting elegy for the Jeffersonian South. “When I think...” she says, “I think of all the mistakes that we as Southerners make... And then I smile, cry, and mourn over my younger days.”

Each chapter could have been a novel, yet they have been distilled - like fine moonshine - into powerful tales. The stories build seamlessly into each other, and the reappearance of the townsfolk throughout give a sense of familiar even at the onset of every new tale. As Old Professor Rayburn says, “Concord,” means “harmony” - and these eleven stories weave together into a tapestry that speaks to the aspirations of Americana.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780312537371
Subtitle:
A Southern Town in Eleven Stories
Author:
Neofotis, Peter
Publisher:
St. Martin's Press
Subject:
Stories (single author)
Subject:
City and town life
Subject:
Cities and towns
Subject:
Short Stories (single author)
Subject:
Southern states
Subject:
Cities and towns -- Virginia.
Edition Description:
Trade Cloth
Publication Date:
July 2009
Binding:
Hardcover
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
178
Dimensions:
8.25 x 5.50 in
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