Tag: Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

Madcap Mayhem

In a zany debut novel

By Anne Blythe

Remember Best in Show, that quirky Christopher Guest mockumentary that pokes fun at eccentric dog owners and the competitive world of breeding and showing purebreds? Fast forward 25 years.

Mimi Montgomery, a Washington-based Axios reporter who hails from Gaston County, has taken that same chaotic culture, given it a modern twist, dropped in a body count, and delivered a wacky spoof of millennial dog culture in her debut mystery, Murder Bites.

In this suburban satire, Montgomery takes us to the fictitious Glenville, South Carolina, where protagonist Margot Cartwright stands out like a sore thumb. Margot is thrust into a sea of cliquey moms when her husband inherits his childhood home and moves her and their two children into an unfamiliar culture, a world away from the life they knew and liked in the nation’s capital.

She detests her new life. And when we first encounter the willing outcast, she is preoccupied with the whole town’s seeming obsession with a TV reality show called Pawsh and the lengths to which her neighbors will go to get their bougie pups a chance at prime time.

Margot’s mutt, Sid Vicious, did not measure up to the show’s standards, but even if he had, she would not have subjected her lovable companion to such drama.

This was a town where Quinn Chandler and her Lhasa Apso wore matching pelts. Tippi Hayburn carried her pug in a pink BabyBjörn on her chest. And Sally-Claire Foster, Hattie O’Connor and Weezie Whiteagle wrangled their dogs into matching floral rompers, “making them dead ringers for the von Trapp children’s curtain wear.” With a Pawsh camera crew in town from Los Angeles, dogs romp across the center green in their “jaunty, tartan, smoking jackets” and “custom-fitted shearling booties.”

Margot is a woman who considers “public disruption an art form,” and she counts herself among the masters of her craft, just as Leonardo da Vinci was in his artistic world. That might mean strapping a homemade sandwich board onto Sid Vicious calling for an end to designer puppy mills and keeping Pawsh out of Glenville. She had no qualms about sneaking around in the cloak of darkness to yank “Everything is Pawsh-ible” signs — planted by members of the “Mommy Mafia” — out of her Stepford-esque neighborhood.

“The Mafiosas,” Montgomery writes, “had swiftly shunned Margot upon her arrival to town, and so she studied them with the fringe fascination of Jane Goodall perched under a jungle leaf in Tanzania, watching as they carpooled their children around in $80,000 luxury SUVs, ginormous wedding rings sparkling, or as they carried out the kind of hobby-jobs well-off women dabble in when bored — professional organizing, assembling charcuterie boards, mid-level marketing schemes.”

What Margot found “perhaps most integral to the Mommy Mafiosos,” Montgomery continued, “were the companions perpetually nestled in the cradle of their sculpted biceps, the kind of squirrel-dog hybrids that weighed about the same as a head of lettuce while also costing about the same as a year of in-state tuition.”

When signs go missing, protests become disruptive or one of the more insufferable dog moms receives weekly orders of unsolicited Lord Farquaad bob wigs to match her hairstyle, Margot usually is behind the antics.

So when Boomer, the local dog walker, is found dead in a front yard Halloween display with Home Depot skeletons, Margot, persona non grata in the neighborhood, quickly becomes suspect number one. Only this time, she didn’t do it.

Margot sets out to clear her name, but she can’t do it alone. Two unlikely neighbors band together to help her with the sleuthing — Anne, the stylish, 70-something widow who relishes reigning over the neighborhood HOA with an iron fist, and Sally-Claire, who sours on the Mommy Mafia and their judgey ways.

Madcap investigations ensue. Twists and turns occur, keeping readers guessing.

Montgomery’s debut novel is zany, laugh-out loud funny in places, and a complete joyride, packed with entertaining characters and cultural caricatures deftly planted throughout the pages. OH

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades covering city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and the many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.

Omnivorous Reader

Seeing Spirits

And the decisions that haunt us

Jim Moriarty

Let’s dispense with the easy part. “Gram calls photographs paper ghosts. She says they’re the only ghosts everyone can see.” So says Willamena Wester — Wills to her friends — the central character of Sarah Addison Allen’s new novel, Paper Ghosts. The real apparitions show up later.

Gram is Alice Wester, the dowager of Hen Town. Nothing escapes Alice’s ability to know it or divine it in some quasi-mystical way. “Rewind,” the first of the novel’s three parts, takes place in 1976. Wills is a teenager, and her posse is known as The Feathers, named for their teased-to-the-max hairstyle. “By the time the bell rang, Wills had managed to get Dorothy’s feathers back in place, though she’d used so much hair spray that Dorothy was now combustible,” writes Allen.

We meet Andy Smooth, the head of a traveling musical group, and Jack Vaughn, the band’s youngest member and the person Wills falls desperately in love with. “He was quoting Shakespeare again, while dancing to a song no one could hear under an umbrella when there wasn’t a storm, with his hand to her waist as if it was meant to be there.” Ratted out by one of The Feathers — with a Polaroid, of course, of the young clandestine couple — Gram is determined to keep Willamena in Hen Town and tries to buy off young Jack, who accepts the money as a get-out-of-town stake, then tries to convince Wills to go with him.

“And I lie awake at night thinking about a beautiful girl I just met whose grandmother has made her believe that she can only exist here, that she will vanish like magic if she steps outside of this place, so she’s afraid to leave. And I can’t stay,” says Jack.

A tussle ensues in Gram’s “redbrick, federal-style home . . . three stories tall and imposing with more windows to see what was going on than any other house in town.” Jack tumbles down a flight of stairs — perhaps or perhaps not helped along by Gram — and dies. He’s buried in the basement but his ghost remains.

And so does Wills. We “Fast Forward” in part two, and Wills, who married (and outlived) the man she was supposed to marry before Jack came along, has remained in Wester House and, in almost every respect, morphed into her grandmother. Her nickname, to the living, has morphed, too, into Mim. At the door are her widower son, Tug (Terrance), and her granddaughter Bailey, who are moving in. “‘You’re a remarkable woman, Wills, but even you can’t open a door without turning the knob first,’ she heard Jack say from behind her.”

Tug gives Bailey the tour. “For the next half hour, the presence in the house followed them as Tug made sure Bailey knew every nook and cranny, most of it off-limits due to what he called the Wester Rules,” writes Allen. “The Wester Rules weren’t actually his rules. They were Mim’s. And they weren’t made up on the spot, either. They’d been around for a long time.” Those rules included no visitors, no music and a double-lock on the basement door.

Bailey, it turns out, can see Jack if Jack wants to be seen. “To her astonishment there was now a handsome young man standing next to the piano. He looked like someone from decades ago with his dark hair touching his shoulders and a shaggy mustache shaped like a horseshoe. His jeans had bell bottoms so long they touched the floor, and the snaps of his shirt were undone nearly to low-rise at this hips. There was a yellow rose pinned to the wide collar. He seemed so happy to see her that he didn’t know what to say. Or maybe he was just happy for her to finally see him.”

Mim becomes as protective of Bailey as her grandmother had been of her, a choice that leads to a different kind of disaster when Bailey is accosted, not by a true love like Jack, but by a thug of a man named Clutch, which calls for a different kind of accident altogether. Let’s just say, Clutch gets his — another mystery solved in the end. “I know I made you dependent on only me and your father for companionship, but I thought it was the one thing that would keep you safe until you could make your own decisions,” says Mim. “But what really happened was you grew up desperate to feel connection, which led you to Clutch. If I had just told you this story of the man I fell in love with, instead of imposing on you something you didn’t understand, things would have ended differently.”

Allen writes in the opening of her epilogue, “Once upon a time, there was a family of witches. But witches, it turns out, are sometimes only women who have been hurt, and are determined not to be again.” The toing and froing through the generations can get a bit confusing at times, but the trip is worth it. The great fiction writer Raymond Chandler once counseled others to try to put three things on every page that mean something to you as a writer. A sentence, a description, maybe just a word. The cumulative effect will be quality. Allen’s ability to turn a phrase is a fine example of it.

Of Jack: “It was such a vulnerable moment, his guard down, loneliness beaming through the cracks.”

Of Mrs. Orr, the housekeeper: “… taking every smudge on the furniture as a personal insult . . .”

On Jack: “It was Jack. Her beautiful Jack. He looked so out of place, a wildflower in a manicured garden.”

On Wester House: “This was an old house and the floorboards creaked like knee joints.”

On the neighborhood in Hen Town: “There was a curious element of the unseen, like if money could haunt you, it would haunt you here, where the air was as soft and cottony as a veil.”

When Mim leaves the house: “People immediately got on their phones and called their neighbors, tracking her movements across town the way they might have tracked a grizzly bear that wandered out of the woods.”

On Bailey: “Every time she colored her hair, she liked this moment best — looking in the mirror and seeing someone she didn’t recognize, hoping it was someone she finally wanted to be.”

And so on. They were among the many little treats that made Paper Ghosts a pleasure to read. OH

Jim Moriarty is the editor of PineStraw. He can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com

2026 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

The Ryan Express

Will we see his like again?

By Anne Blythe

As Major League Baseball enters its stretch run, separating pretenders from true contenders for post-season play, Raleigh-based sportswriter Tim Brown has a new book that diamond purists will want to tuck into.

Although you can’t write a comprehensive Nolan Ryan life story without mentioning the record 5,714 career strikeouts and seven no-hitters, Brown chases a different plotline. In his biography Nolan: The Singular Life of an American Original, Brown goes beyond the box scores that detail the feats of the Hall of Famer with the longest playing career in MLB history. He takes his readers down to Alvin, Texas, the gritty, close-knit small town that shaped the ethos of the league’s ultimate power pitcher whose unparalleled longevity spanned 27 years.

“I think the essence of Nolan Ryan is here, in Alvin” Brown told a contemporary of the pitcher at a senior center Bingo game. “These are the towns that make men like him.”

Alvin doesn’t hide its pride. It has a statue of Ryan, a museum room dedicated to him, and a high school baseball field, junior high and community center named for him. Restaurants proudly display photos of the famous (infamous) headlock that Ryan threw on Chicago White Sox batter Robin Ventura in a 1993 game when the third baseman rushed the mound after a fast ball struck him on the arm. Brown dedicates a whole chapter to that legendary scene and one of the most replayed baseball clips of all time.

Through interviews with people who grew up with Ryan and knew his whole family as well as his wife, Ruth — Nolan’s high school sweetheart — Brown delivers much more than a baseball book. It’s a story of a family, a state and a way of life that led to a relentless work ethic. Brown’s profile of a man who has been the subject of dozens of books also embodies a good bit of myth-busting, while creating a few of its own.

With the gift of vivid storytelling that often sets sportswriters apart from the pack, Brown shows you the young boy pedaling his bike down narrow roads to “dusty ballfields.” You can almost hear the Texas drawl of the longtime Alvin residents swapping their Ryan stories that often have only a tangential connection to the development of the hometown boy’s famous pitching arm.

“Undertake a retelling of Nolan Ryan’s life through the prism of time and discover that the stories of cowboys far outnumber the actual cowboys, which doesn’t make them any less entertaining,” Brown writes. “In real life, we’ve moved on to the drugstore kind, to keyboard outlaws and Fortnite addicts and snowplow parents and participation trophies and cars that drive themselves. Starting pitchers who beg out after five innings and then get handshakes for it.

“Call it evolution if you must,” Brown continues. “What survives in the witnesses is the gooey insides of old age, the pixel-free highlights, and the romantic version of a game played on the last tendril of an ulnar collateral ligament.”

Ryan, the youngest of six children born to Martha Lee (Hancock) Ryan and Lynn Nolan Ryan Sr., was initiated into a tireless work ethic at a young age. He was up before dawn, rolling and delivering the now defunct Houston Post with his father, who also worked in the oil fields. He was steeped in the ranching culture, and grew up in a world where men were taught to do the work and own the outcome, no excuses. They were taught to speak only when necessary and stand by their word.

Brown acknowledges the adversity that Ryan faced in his career — his boom-or-bust years with the Mets, and the lingering feeling that he was unable to live up to his potential coming out of high school as a skinny kid with a triple-digit fastball. And it’s no secret that Ryan’s all-or-nothing pitching style — likely influenced by the Alvin mindset baked into him — led to a high number of free tickets to first base for the batters at the other end of his fast balls. Like another pitcher of his era — we’re thinking Bob Gibson — taking the mound was nothing less than taking charge. Pitcher and hitter were mano a mano.

In an interview incorporated in the prologue of Brown’s book, Ryan takes us to where he is now and the evolution of the sport that has made him an unmatched statistical anomaly and a seemingly untouchable benchmark for pitching durability. Surrounded “by the reminders of a life — not just a career, but a life — built on the ideal of finishing what he’d started,” Brown writes, Ryan leans back in his leather chair, hoists a leg on the edge of the desk and says, simply, “The game has changed.”

“Not mad. Not put out. Just saying,” Brown writes.

Then Brown offers something for the purists to ponder as modern baseball bullpens rely on a parade of specialized relievers for the starters who rarely, if ever, stay on the mound for an entire game.

“Going on six decades after he arrived, that something like a Nolan Ryan happened in the same game that is today’s version is almost inconceivable,” Brown writes. “That it might again is unthinkable. Then, it’s fair to wonder if the game has changed all that much. Or if the men who play it have. That’ll have to work itself out.” OH

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades covering city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.

2026 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

The Skill of Perseverance

The remarkable second act of John Quincy Adams

By Jim Moriarty

If your American history IQ, like mine, falls somewhere between Animal House’s Flounder — “fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son” — and the great David McCullough, you’ll find America’s Founding Son both an enlightening and rewarding portrayal of our sixth president, John Quincy Adams.

It’s written by Bob Crawford, something of an oddity in itself given he’s the upright bass player for The Avett Brothers band. “For more than two decades, I’ve studied American history while rambling up and down the interstates, freeways, and back roads of America,” Crawford writes in his introduction. While not exactly an autodidact, his lifelong fascination, beginning as a kid collecting fliers about historic landmarks at highway welcome centers, places him in the company of another member of the band, Scott Avett, who has a side hustle as an admired visual artist.

With the recent passing of Ted Turner, one is reminded of the quote he often attributed to his father, “Be sure to set your goals so high that you can’t possibly accomplish them in one lifetime.” This is, in fact, the crux of Crawford’s thesis about Adams and the goal was, or became, the abolition of slavery. His primary source is Adams’ own diaries, written faithfully on a daily basis, that illuminate the arc of JQA’s understanding of how America must eventually, and tragically, cope with its most egregious and contradictory failing.

Jimmy Carter is often extolled as a man who, in the modern age at least, made the most of his post presidency, but he was a piker compared to John Quincy, who, after losing the presidential race of 1828, briefly considered retiring from public life but instead won election to the U.S. House of Representatives. He served the citizens of Massachusetts in that capacity from 1831 until his death in 1848, when he collapsed at his desk in the House chamber and died two days later on a couch in the Speaker’s Room in the Capitol building. During those 17 years, Adams became a formidable opponent of slavery, argued the Amistad case before the Supreme Court, defeated the “gag” rule designed to muffle anti-slavery petitions, and outmaneuvered efforts, led by representatives of the “slavocracy,” as Crawford calls it, to censure him.

“John Quincy Adams may not have been an extraordinary president like Washington and Lincoln, but he is our most extraordinary ex-president. A maverick. A public servant. An American hero,” Crawford concludes.

Adams’ opposition to slavery was never in question, but his theories on what exactly to do about it evolved over time, a transition Crawford illustrates through Adams’ diary and speeches. “America’s founding son had reached the end of his patience,” Crawford writes of an 1844 clash on the House floor. “He shuddered in 1820, when he prophesied a violent dissolution of the Union, but all he had experienced in the nearly twenty-five years since proved to him that the South would never, ever, voluntarily or otherwise, give up being the enslavers.”

Crawford’s fascination with the period of American history between the War of 1812 and the Civil War came into focus after reading Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. His own study of John Quincy is divided into three acts. The first begins with Adams’ appointment as secretary of state under James Monroe, covers his election to the presidency in the House of Representatives in 1824 (the second time the young republic picked a president in that manner), his loss to Andrew Jackson in their rematch in 1828 and concludes with the voters of Plymouth, Massachusetts, sending him to the House as their representative. In act two Crawford does an admirable job of setting the table. “In 1835, the slavery issue was tearing the fabric of the nation apart. Its threads tossed into a smoldering furnace of bigotry and hate. And there was Adams. A witness to all of it. Sitting on the fence. Waiting for his moment.” That moment builds to a crescendo in act three.

The political figures of the day — Jackson, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Martin Van Buren — are carefully drawn, as are the central issues of nullification (What if the federal government says one thing and a state refuses?) and what to do about Texas. Of equal, or even greater, interest are the abolitionists: Benjamin Lundy, Charles Finney, Theodore Weld, Arthur Tappan (full disclosure, the square at my alma mater is named Tappan Square), William Lloyd Garrison and the writings of David Walker.

When Crawford first pitched the idea of America’s Founding Son to his agent, he thought he’d be paired with a writer to produce the final work. Instead, he was left to his own devices. The result is highly readable, no small feat when you’re bound to be leaning on quotes written in the first half of the 19th century. If there is any complaint — and it is admittedly minor — it’s that on a rare occasion or two he strays too far into the vernacular of his own day, seemingly trying a bit too hard to prove that history doesn’t have to be tedious and dense. This is, perhaps, an innocent byproduct of cohosting his history podcast, “The Road to Now.”

Where Crawford ends up is in praise of a historical figure most of us, I’d venture to say, don’t often associate with greatness. “Adams brought the issue of slavery out of the darkness and into the light of the center of politics in the United States — the People’s House. John Quincy Adams preserved and protected the American democracy established by the founding generation — his father’s generation,” writes Crawford. “As the man standing in the breach, Adams passed the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence on to the next generation. With one hand reaching back to the founding and the other reaching forward toward the Civil War, John Quincy Adams is a bridge and perhaps the best representation of America’s tortured adolescence.”

If, in reading Founding Son, you see traces of modern America — our deeply flawed and fractured America — so does Crawford. “I can’t say for sure whether history repeats or rhymes, but I do notice echoes from the past in our present. That’s because history is driven by people — and people haven’t changed since 1776,” he writes. “Truth be told, people haven’t changed since Adam and Eve, or however you signify the beginning of time (or should I say history?). Spend a little time reading about the 1830s and 1840s, and you’ll encounter figures who feel eerily familiar. They dressed differently, used different slang and communicated via what now seem like antiquated technologies — but in a very real sense, we are them and they are us.” OH

Jim Moriarty is the editor of PineStraw. He can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

2026 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

Against All Odds

Characters living on life’s edge

By Anne Blythe

If you’ve ever felt caught in one of life’s undertows, fighting overwhelming currents seemingly beyond your control, you might find a kindred spirit among the cast of characters in Jared Lemus’ debut short story collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody.

Lemus, a Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill, has compiled 12 vignettes portraying men and boys living in Guatemala or the United States. The protagonists are barely making ends meet, either caught in low-paying jobs or living on society’s edges through illicit means. Many of them are struggling to break free from generational poverty, Byzantine bureaucracy and emotional vulnerabilities.

The ache of unfulfilled possibility unites these principal characters — a healer, a van taxi driver, a long-haul trucker, a night busman, an aspiring tattoo artist, a laundryman, a builder, a once-celebrated soccer player turned middling middle school coach, teenage highway robbers and kids left to fend for themselves in this country after their parents were deported or returned home to Guatemala.

There is a machismo and toughness that permeates these protagonists that rarely masks their underlying vulnerability and tenderness. There are females in their orbit, but few are as fleshed out as the central male figures. The women often provide the unvarnished truth with warmhearted mercy.

Lemus shows a flair for different writing styles throughout the collection. In the opening story, “Ofrendas,” he gives readers a taste of Guatemalan pacing and dialogue, using Spanish-style inverted opening and closing marks throughout the lyrical English. The story kicks off the collection with a nod toward indigenous Guatemala and the Mayan tradition of people bringing cigarettes, candies, flowers, alcohol and monetary offerings in search of relief or protection from San Simon, a saint known to be a trickster representing both light and dark. In this story of second chance seekers and human sacrifice, you can almost feel the fires crackling as the healers greet the petitioners at the pits they’ve built and hear the owls hooting their ominous calls in the highlands beyond the gated monastery.

In “Bus Stop Baby,” a story about a busboy/dishwasher who rides a bus all night for warmth because the damp mattress he rented was in an unheated garage attached to a house filled with cocaine addicts, Lemus gives readers a chance to choose their own adventure mapped out in two columns, Option A or Option B.

There’s traditional storytelling, too, always with vivid descriptions. In “Heart Sleeves,” a story of an aspiring tattoo artist seemingly “opting for weed and heartbreak” over fulfilled potential, you can almost hear the bee-like buzz of the tattoo guns.

In “Saint Dismas,” a story of amateur highway robbers scheming for food and motel money, your fists might clench in pain as Lemus describes the rope-burned hands of the teens posing as construction workers whose plans went awry when a car sped through the thick cord they stretched across a Guatemalan road to force passersby to stop.

While it might sound like Guatemalan Rhapsody is all doom and gloom, there is wit and light humor amid the darkness. The collection is a true rhapsody, made up of many different riffs on stories of people swimming against the tide, striving for validation, love and survival.

The most pleasurable note among the variations is how Lemus treats his protagonists with dignity and compassion, traits that could go a long way in the world today. OH

2026 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

Doubling Down

Finding the familiar in the extraordinary

By Jim Moriarty

“If you don’t tell their story, who will?”

This was the question posed to Christina Baker Kline by Lesley Looper, a cousin and Duke University librarian, about the lives of the renowned “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng Bunker and their wives, Sarah and Adelaide Yates — Kline’s distant relatives.

The short answer is that a lot of people have. The famous brothers, conjoined at the chest, who came to America in 1829 and eventually settled in North Carolina, have been satirized in poetry, made cameo appearances in works by Herman Melville and Mark Twain, been used as a metaphor during the War Between the States, and been the subject — or at least the literary device — of 21st-century musicals, plays and movies. Does the fact that Kline’s genealogical family tree includes them make her imaginings somehow more prescient? Since the twins died 152 years ago, probably not. What is quite clear from the earliest pages of Kline’s The Foursome, due out this month, is that she has taken extraordinary care to imagine her characters less as curiosity and more as men and women in full, portrayed with distinct traits, virtues and flaws, and very much creatures of their age, one of America’s most turbulent times.

Here’s a Wikipedia-worthy primer: Chang and Eng were brought to the United States from Siam (today’s Thailand) by the Scottish merchant Robert Hunter and a sea captain named Abel Coffin, who put them “on tour” in Britain and America. The on-again, off-again business wound up a decade later with the brothers touring on their own with their own staff, becoming wealthy in the process. In July 1839 they made an appearance in Jefferson, North Carolina, and in October of that year, they returned to purchase 150 acres in Wilkes County, where they would meet and marry the Yates sisters. This is where the novel takes over.

When Kline realized that Sarah (Sallie) was not buried in the same resting place as Chang, Eng and her sister, Adelaide, she discovered the voice of her narrator. Sallie is as clear-eyed about herself as she is every other character in the novel. “Addie possessed the self-assurance of the beautiful. She was used to being seen, and it made her bold about being heard,” writes Kline. “I inherited our mother’s round cheeks, her solid bones and small gray eyes, her unruly auburn hair. Addie took after Papa’s family: tall and lean, with dark-fringed lashes and high cheekbones. She shone in contrast to my ordinariness. She was charming while I was shy.”

The vivacious Addie is drawn to Chang, the more dominant brother. “Addie claimed she’d fallen in love with Chang, and maybe she had. She said she felt it deeply. But Addie felt everything deeply,” writes Kline. “Somehow, though I’d voiced my misgivings from the beginning, I’d let the months unspool without taking a firm stand. Now I found myself swept up in my sister’s insistence that marrying the brothers was the right, the only, thing to do.”

Kline doesn’t shy from the physical awkwardness of this union squared, though neither does she dwell on it. The mantra for Sallie is compartmentalization. Don’t think about everything, “only the next thing.”

The sisters’ conversation on their wedding day is portrayed like this:

“Everyone will be staring at us,” I whispered.

“Of course they will. We’re the brides.”

“They’re thinking about — about tonight.”

“Don’t be silly. Nobody’s thinking about that, except maybe you. You’ll be fine. Remember: only the next thing. All right?”

“All right.”

The foursome marries in 1843. After finessing the physical, Kline does an admirable job of portraying these two families through the next 30-plus, turbulent years, through war, peace, the inevitable loss of parents, the birth, and sometimes tragic death, of children and the eventual death of Chang and Eng. In fact, it is this dramatization of the travails of two families that, in a way, normalizes that which is anything but. The couples eventually live in separate houses, one in Surrey County, one in Wilkes County, spending three days at each. “During the three days in the home of the host, the visiting brother will conduct no business and express no opinions. He is to be a silent partner,” declares Chang. Between them the two families would have 21 children who would grow into an assortment of cousins devoted to one another.

Though joined at the chest, the brothers are not the same person. “Eng liked to gamble, his eyes brightening with each new hand. Chang preferred to drink. Neither quite approved of the other’s vice.” Chang could be cruel and moody, Eng the peacemaker. “Eng’s instinct was to ignore or concede, but even he had his limits. Sometimes, like a cat poked too often, he struck back. More than ever, I saw how tightly the band bound him to his brother. What had once been a tether now felt like a shackle.”

Every time their financial picture darkens, the brothers go back on the road to refill the coffers, but the way they are perceived has changed. What once was a curiosity has given way to ridicule. They eventually hook up with P.T. Barnum, who dislikes the brothers because of their independent streak as much as they detest the famous showman for his exploitation.

Chang and Eng are free men of color who become slaveholders and supporters of the Southern cause. Two sons, one from each family, fight for the Confederacy. “The brothers had learned early on that the world is divided into those with power and those without. Those who own and those who are owned. They’d decided — perhaps from the moment they first felt the weight of coins in their palms — where they stood on that divide.” The families feel the depravations of war and struggle with issues of race. “The shortages deepened. Every stitch of fabric was repurposed, every scrap of food stretched.” Stoneman’s cavalry came. The world changes, the enslaved are enslaved no more. “The hardest part wasn’t learning to do things for ourselves, though that was difficult enough. It was learning to see people we’d spent years looking through. To acknowledge that the women who had wiped our children’s tears had children of their own whose hurts had gone unseen.”

If the world paid attention to Chang and Eng, Kline gives more than equal time to Sallie and Addie and the place of women in the 19th century, dramatized throughout, from unwanted pregnancies at the hands of unscrupulous men; to Eng, the slaveowner taking advantage of the enslaved Grace; to the assured figure of Sallie’s lesbian aunt, Joan. Given all that, The Foursome stretches beyond the voyeuristic, attempting to paint a fuller picture of two brothers and two sisters, tethered by more than just flesh.

2026 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

The Forest Primeval

Finding identity in a Hemlock

By Anne Blythe

Midway through Melissa Faliveno’s Hemlock: A Novel, her protagonist, Sam, awakens after a night of many beers and shots, disoriented in the thick of the Wisconsin Northwoods.

The ground is wet with dew. Damp leaves cling to her body. She has no idea where she is nor how she got there. On the forest floor where she finds herself, far below the canopy above, small shade-tolerant trees and plants survive in the low light, providing a vital layer of sustenance for the wildlife living among them. As Sam emerges from her oblivion, confused but unafraid, the word “understory” pops into her mind.

“She whispered the word to herself and thought of things that live in the light, and things that live in the dark. How whole worlds and realities can exist in things unspoken and unseen,” Faliveno writes. “How there’s a story told aloud, in the open, above the surface of things, and there’s a story beneath it, that one must look much harder to find.”

Hemlock, Faliveno’s debut novel, is as layered as the Northwoods, a vast expanse of dense coniferous and hardwood forests, glacial lakes and rustic cabins and cottages. It’s a story of self-discovery — a dreamlike exploration into addiction, inherited generational trauma, gender identity and sexuality. It’s also a story that defies genre.

In Hemlock, Faliveno, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill creative writing professor, pulls from Gothic tropes: a gloomy cabin in an isolated area, a non-traditional damsel in distress, ancestral curses and a talking deer that —no matter how hokey it sounds — works. At the same time it’s a love story, sinister and sultry, and a tribute to nature that teeters between reality and fantasy.

We meet Sam, a 38-year-old Wisconsinite, when she’s had 10 stable, booze-free months with her boyfriend, Stephen, and their cat, Monster. She’s on her way from their Brooklyn apartment to “Hemlock,” her family’s desolate cabin nestled in the heart of the Northwoods. Once a place of family togetherness for Sam and her parents, a creepy vibe had settled into the cabin ever since her mother’s eerie walk into the woods, never to be seen again.

As the miles and days roll by, Sam’s fragile grip on reality becomes even more tenuous. In her dreams, the cabin is a huge, “hulking, looking thing with endless doors and hallways, walls that seemed to breathe; a maze of passages that changed shape and stretched on forever; into nothing.” In reality, it is “a normal little house, with four normal walls, a normal little porch and chimney” that her father built for retirement but now is ready to sell.

As Sam replaces broken floorboards and repairs things, she’s living in virtual seclusion, a marked difference from the urban frenzy of New York City. The rot of the cottage and surrounding area hollowed out by recession creeps into her mind and she begins to slip back into old behaviors. Just one beer turns into one more. Then a sixpack. Then one brandy old-fashioned, and another before an empty bottle awaits her on the counter in the morning. Amid the slip from sobriety, Sam wrestles with whether she wants to return to her boyfriend, her job as a magazine editor and the life she built in New York.

The novel — a probe of the indecipherable space between one place and another, one gender and another, one sexuality and another and past and present— is not always an easy read. It can be frustrating and exhausting watching Sam settle into a buzz that, no matter how hard she tries, cannot quiet the persistent whisper of her emotional unraveling.

Can the Midwest she fled ever be home again? Does she identify as a man, woman or something else more fluid that’s not so easily defined? Can she eschew the booze that is part of her culture and escape the throes of addiction passed down from her grandmother to her mother and on to her?

Somehow, though, Faliveno’s vivid and descriptive writing keeps pulling you back in. She makes you feel like a confidant, a trusted but objective friend who can help Sam as she tries to break free from the expectations of a world with deeply entrenched norms and stereotypes.

Faliveno is very introspective, pondering a wide range of topics, any one of which probably could have anchored a book. Despite the dark themes in Hemlock, there is beauty in the ugliness and light in the understory.

2026 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOURS READER

Storytelling at Its Best

A sweetly crafted tale of golf and life

By Stephen E. Smith

The best writers, those gifted beyond the ordinary, harbor obsessions, and when producing their finest work, they transform those obsessions into prose that they share communally with readers. That’s the case with Bill Fields’ A Quick Nine Before Dark. His obsession is golf — and anyone who’s been caught up in the intricacies of the game will want to read Fields’ memoir, front to back.

Fields is a North Carolina boy. Born in Pinehurst in 1959, he attended public schools in Moore County and graduated from the University of North Carolina. For 20 years, he was a senior editor for Golf World and is the recipient of the PGA Lifetime Achievement Award.

A Quick Nine Before Dark is for golfers of all skill levels. Even if you’ve never whacked a golf ball and you surf past reruns of Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf like it’s a Progressive commercial, you’ll likely find yourself swept up by Fields’ beautifully crafted prose, and the personal twists and turns of his life as a golf writer. He comes across as a gentle, earnest and thoughtful human being who has nevertheless tackled life head-on. You’ll find no scandals, no shocking moral shortcomings, no dark musing, no vilifications of former friends — just straight-ahead storytelling at its best.

Writers have tics and twitches of style that identify them as surely as their DNA, but Fields’ flaws are few, if any, and there’s nothing about his writing more rewarding than his efficient use of descriptive prose. When he feels the need to shine, he does precisely that, as with this excerpted Golf World description of Davis Love III as he captured a major title: “The conclusion to the ninety-seventh PGA Championship was soggy and sweet, like strawberries and sponge cake. As quickly as the late afternoon rain had come on Sunday to Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, New York, it stopped, and the sun peeked through an angry sky. Two rainbows arched over the course at just the right moment, as if scripted by Frank Capra himself, and for Davis Love III, there wasn’t a burden in sight.”

Fields blends the elation of honest achievement with the whimsy of happenstance. In three carefully crafted sentences, he transports the reader to a significant moment in professional golf, evoking the sweetness of strawberries and sponge cake, and framing the moment of triumph with an allusion to a great filmmaker. Then he concludes with a pithy understatement: “. . . there wasn’t a burden in sight.” Could there be a more endearing description of earned exhilaration?

When the occasional somber moment intrudes, it’s handled with grace and thoughtful solemnity, as when Fields learned that his former wife, Marianne, had died. He was hundreds of miles away, talking with his mother by phone, when he heard the news: “It’s Marianne, Bill. She died. . . . Nothing in divorce-recovery books, the radio talk show advice, or the support of friends in the wake of a failed marriage had prepared me for those words.” The deaths of his mother and father are likewise handled unsentimentally but with a necessary touch of sentiment. “Life is ragged,” he writes. “Voids linger. Loose ends are everywhere.”

Fields’ obsession with sports began when he was a child, gravitating toward any game that involved a ball. When he failed to become a basketball star, he turned to golf after receiving a Spalding starter kit for Christmas in 1969. His focus on the game waxed and waned until he was a student at UNC, where he wrote for the Daily Tar Heel. After graduation, he knocked around the golf world, promoting the game, until he accepted a position with the Athens Banner-Herald, which would evolve into an associate editorship at Golf World. What followed was a series of positions that eventually led back to Golf World, the magazine that started in the same town where he was born.

Fields covered tournaments in the United States and overseas, which brought him into contact with the greatest golfers of our time. How many golfers can boast that they’ve played the game with Sam Snead and Tiger Woods?

But A Quick Nine Before Dark is more than another golf book — it’s also about becoming a writer and what it takes to remain ascendant in a field where technology advances at breakneck speed. From the moment Fields, an elementary school kid, put pencil to paper and wrote “I like to write,” his life had been about arranging the right words in the best possible order.

Fields’ work may require him to live in Connecticut, but he is as much a Southern writer as Faulkner and as romantic about his hometown as Thomas Wolfe was about Asheville.

At 13, Fields worked as a busboy at Russell’s Fish House in Carthage, which recently closed. Describing the restaurant in its heyday, he treats us to magical paragraphs that touch all the senses: “. . . Russell’s was the most clamorous place in creation — more deafening than any argument my sisters ever had, more ear-piercing than the hocking sounds made by my fifth-grade teacher, more thunderous than a Seaboard freight train when it trundled through town . . . Wooden chairs scraping angrily on cement floors. Customers’ animated conversations and guffaws reverberating off cinderblock walls . . . Flatware and platters clanging into busboys’ bins as they and the wait staff dashed about like running backs seeking holes in a defense.”

And like any good Southerner, Fields brings us home, mystified, as most of us are, by the relationship of the past to the present: “Stretches of U.S. 1 and U.S. 15-501 are now blighted by a sprawl of commercial establishments, stores and restaurants. Attempting a left turn without an illuminated green arrow can be risky business. Traffic planners debate solutions. Meanwhile, at certain times of day, dozens of cars idle, waiting to pass the busiest intersections.”

Fields’ writing is unfailingly lucid, exact, and engaging. What’s not obvious is that he’s worked over his prose until that “worked on” feeling is gone. His many readers will be the beneficiaries of that labor.

2026 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

The Theft That Wasn’t

The tale of the lost and found Picasso

By Anne Blythe

Most of us have heard that old cliché “Kids say the darnedest things,” but few of us could imagine getting the kind of phone call that Whitcomb Mercer Rummel Sr. received in March 1969 from his eldest child. There was nothing cliché or cutesy about it.

“Hey, Dad, I accidentally stole a Picasso,” Bill Rummel said to his father nearly 57 years ago. What happened afterward is a bit of creative skullduggery that has been concealed in the annals of one family’s history far longer than one of the key participants would have liked.

Whit Rummel Jr., a filmmaker who lives in Chapel Hill, and Noah Charney, an American art historian and fiction writer based in Slovenia, have written The Accidental Picasso Thief: The True Story of a Reverse Heist, Outrunning the FBI and Fleeing the Boston Mob to share that story with the rest of the world.

Disclosure: I have known Whit Rummel, the author, for many years, relishing in his stories and adventures. Although I’ve heard bits and pieces of this story before, this is the first time I’ve been able to soak it all in.

As Whit Rummel, the only surviving member of the trio that pulled off the so-called “reverse heist” writes, the book — part memoir, part true crime — “is the story of one of the oddest art crimes in American history.”

It’s a tale Rummel has wanted to share in full for decades but couldn’t — for reasons ranging from fear of the famous mobster Whitey Bulger, to respect for a brother’s wishes and a dogged hunt for the location of the painting. In June 2023 The New York Times ran a story titled “Hey Dad, Can You Help Me Return the Picasso I Stole?” but Rummel had more to say.

It begins in 1969. Whit Sr. was an empty-nester with his wife in Waterville, Maine. He was the owner of a popular restaurant near Interstate 95 and an ice cream store with in-house creamery serving up unique and enticing flavors like Icky Orgy.

Bill Rummel was in his mid-20s at the time, working as a forklift operator at Logan Airport in Boston moving crates around the world for Emery Air Freight. A historic snowstorm hit the East Coast, leaving chaos in its wake. As flights were delayed and diverted, Bill loaded several flats into the trunk of his car from pesky “orphan” piles clogging up the outbound area. Wrapped up in one of those flats was a Pablo Picasso original, Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer, that was en route from Paris to a gallery owner in Milwaukee.

Unlike his younger brother, Whitcomb Mercer Jr., Bill wasn’t particularly interested nor appreciative of art and didn’t realize a valuable painting was in his possession. When he found out what he’d inadvertently done, he called his brother, a passionate art lover, who was at Tulane University at the time. After several phone calls, Bill and Whit decided it was time to call their dad, a man they called “the fixer.”

Whit Sr. and his wife, Ann, had moved to Maine in the ’50s and raised their sons there. The boys had a mischievous streak in them, perhaps inherited from a father who relished taking them on “wild goose chases.”

Whit and Bill, now in young adulthood, needed their father’s guidance. What should they do with the stolen Picasso? This was no wild goose chase. They had heard the FBI was on the hunt for the painting. To make matters worse, rumor was that Whitey Bulger’s notorious Winter Hill Gang also was searching for it, threatening anyone trying to move in on their airport turf.

“Our father, after all, was the grand fixer. The one guy who’d always been there for us, pulling us out of whatever kind of jam we’d found ourselves in (and there had been many),” Whit writes. Their dad reeled off several options. One was keep the painting, bury it under the floor of the Waterville restaurant and uncover it some years later, feigning shock and surprise. The other option? “He said maybe there was a way to return it. Without letting anybody know who took it,” Bill told his brother.

That’s the option they chose. Whit Jr. got instructions from his dad. “I want you to write a brief note to accompany the return of the painting,” his dad said. “Nothing long or complex. Just a few mysterious sentences to put them off the track of someone like Bill.”

To this day, Whit chuckles at the note he composed with intentional “grammatical quirks.”

PLEASE ACCEPT THIS TO
REPLACE IN PART SOME OF THE PAINTINGS REMOVED FROM MUSEUMS ACROSS THE COUNTRY. — ROBBIN’ HOOD.

Whit Sr. and Bill would don costumes, fake mustaches and fedoras, get in a Chevy Impala and set off to return the Picasso at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. An unexpected sighting of an employee near the loading dock upset their plans, but eventually the painting made it to the museum. A blurb announcing its return was in the news, and the Rummels went on with their lives, though their dad would die suddenly just a few years later, in 1972.

As the years went by Whit wanted to make a movie about the unwitting theft, but his brother wanted it to remain a secret, though Bill did do an interview about the incident with This American Life that never aired. He passed away in 2015.

There are some differences in the version Bill told then and what Whit remembers from their phone calls when his brother first told him he had “a friggin’ Picasso.” In the book, Whit shares both versions of how his brother recounted coming into possession of the crate. Though Whit never accuses his brother of knowingly taking the painting, he acknowledges there could be doubts about his intentions.

The book details the surviving Rummel brother’s search for the painting now and his hope to one day have his picture taken in front of it with his son, another Whit Rummel, and a nephew who shares their name, too. If that were to happen, the three — named for “the fixer” — would be “smiling proudly and loudly now, because our story has finally been told.”

For anybody who cares about art, the creation of it, and the quirkiness that makes families special, it’s a story worth telling, reading and even telling again.

2026 Department Omnivorous Reader

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

Sense of Urgency

The stories that need telling

By Stephen E. Smith

It happens to every writer. The moment comes, sometimes sooner than later, when it’s clear that he or she won’t live long enough to write every story that needs telling. The unwritten stories can be offered as spoken anecdotes, which, of course, vaporize the moment they’re uttered, so getting the stories down in print becomes a source of energy and inspiration. Pat Riviere-Seel’s collection, Because I Did Not Drown, derives its urgency from her desire to have the stories remembered — and to be remembered herself. “How long will the work of art last? Who will remember the artist . . . ?” she writes in her essay, “Unknown Artist.”

Reviere-Seel is the author of four poetry books, most notably the well-received The Serial Killer’s Daughter, which was published in 2009 by Charlotte-based Main Street Rag Press. Because I Did Not Drown explores both the exceptional and mundane — “kitchen talk,” the need for perseverance, the joy of pets (in this case cats), a stray fig plant growing by the back stoop, gun control, the loss of old friends, food lovingly prepared, an enthusiasm for jogging, “disenfranchised grief,” extraterrestrials, etc. Each prose chapter is written in straightforward journalistic prose and intended to convey helpful insights into contemporary life.

She begins her collection by recounting her personal experience with the COVID shutdown. She ends the book by detailing the ill effects of the pandemic’s aftermath, topics few writers have tackled (Sean Dempsey’s A Sad Collection of Short Stories, Cheap Parables, Amusing Anecdotes, & Covid-Inspired Bad Poetry is an amusing exception). This reluctance to write about the COVID experience can be attributed to what readers and writers might perceive as proximity aversion: the shock of COVID is still too much with us, and we’ve yet to sort out its spiritual and political implications. Reviere-Seel takes up the subject head-on: “But as the pandemic stretched into a second year, I became more frustrated, angry, and cranky. I missed my poetry group. I missed my friends. . . . We stayed home. We wore masks. We stayed six feet apart. We were grateful to be alive. . . . What had begun as a public health issue became a political issue. The usual anti-vaccine talk mingled with the talk of ‘the government can’t tell me what to do.’” Her concluding essay, “After the Pandemic,” suggests that kindness is the only possible remedy for a virus that continues to mutate: “Be kind. Most of us did not want to infect our family, our friends, our neighbors, or the checkout clerk at the grocery store who showed up for work every day. Genuine kindness is a balm, a gift, a grace.”

In her chapter “Talking About It,” she is straightforward about her struggles with breast cancer. “I didn’t talk about my experience with breast cancer,” she writes, but the death of an aunt who ignored a lump in her breast inspired her to share her experience. “Early detection and medical advances in treatment have meant that breast cancer is no longer the death sentence so many feared fifty years ago.” Her interaction with the medical community will be of particular interest. When she was denied an immediate needle biopsy, she reacted appropriately. “Nice was not working so I threw a fit, a nice-woman-goes-feral southern ‘hissy fit.’ A redhead-gone-rogue tantrum . . . I was paying for a service, medical care, and I wanted — no, demanded — a say in when and how that service was delivered.” Her story is a paradigm for all women and men who find themselves caught up in our often lethargic and convoluted medical system.

The course of her disease followed a predictable path, but she made the necessary decisions to preserve her life. The description of her battle with breast cancer is timely, honest, reassuring and possibly lifesaving.

Following each of the prose passages, a poem explicates or explores the theme of the preceding chapter. The poems are well written and could stand on their own as a chapbook. “After the Diagnosis,” for example, follows the chapter on breast cancer:

There are nights — more

than you ever thought you could endure —

when sleep will not come

your thoughts — no, not thoughts —

the deep well of unknowing appears

endless. You try summoning

visions of sunrise, a shoreline, bare feet

running across packed sand. But morning

fog covers this foreign landscape.

Everything you knew for sure yesterday

washed away with the tide, predictable

too the magical thinking, maybe. Abandon

the dock, row your way into the nightmare, further

out is the only way back.

The use of verse to add emotional impact to the short personal essays may strike some readers as unnecessary. At the very least, the transition from journalistic prose to poetry is complex, requiring a complete shift in sensibility and focus. Nevertheless, she forces readers to grapple with many of our most vexing problems.

2026 Department Omnivorous Reader