Smooth Plot, Good Characters Mean Great Story

Casperian Books, $15

We got fracking issues here in “our counties.”

Spell that with an F and K and keep your guard up. In the mountains, it’s Radon, spelled with a capital R and that means trouble when you’ve got land to sell and developers waving their big bucks around.

Dale Neal, who lives and writes in Asheville, wrote one of my favorite books, “Cow Across America” (Novello Press,Charlotte, comes up full swing again here with his new novel, “The Half Life of Home.”

Royce Wilder has a house full of troubles what with the family acreage where Mama and Uncle Dallas still live, his wife, Eva, the practical one and an epitome of a teen age son, Dean. Smart mouth, full of sass and so real you want to smack the page.

Wilder is the kind of guy who lives next door and somehow manages to step in cow pies even on city sidewalks, with old girl friends like Lucy Green and big money in his face, but when he goes to homecoming at Beverdam Baptist Church, Mama sets him back on the straight and narrow path.

Then there’s the Witch Woman who decorates her cabin door with dried rattlesnake skins — still singing with all their buttons on. And Kyle the homeless waif who knows a secret he can’t ever tell.

We are quickly caught up in their lives and a plot with an accordion fold that’s smooth and creamy as milk-cooked grits.

Neal writes clear, honest prose, a rarity these days, and makes you care about his people, our landscape and where the world is fast going if we don’t keep an eye out.

Trust me, you’ll like this one. And Dale Neal.

Ruth Moose is a long-time reviewer for The Pilot.