‘Tis the season. Skeletons haunt yards, and pumpkins are plopped on porches. Kids (and many adults) are scheming about their Halloween costumes.
But if you really want to get in the mood for Halloween, in a local kind of way, pick up “The Devil’s Done Come Back: New Ghost Tales from North Carolina,” a collection of stories and poems edited by Winston-Salem’s Ed Southern and published by Blair, a small press based in Durham.
You’ll get what you expect: a slinky, lurking cat; people who died years ago re-appearing to have a chat; hands desperately scraping on the outside of windows; and ghosts riding horses in the foggy night. But you will also get some timely and interesting commentary on topics that feel more pertinent to day-to-day life.
Woven through the short stories and poems from over a dozen North Carolina writers are four installments of “A House of Vine and Shadow,” an overarching, fairytale-like story of Nate Batts, a young developer from the fictional Goldleaf Company. Nate’s soulless job is to convince homeowners to let Goldleaf buy them out of their old property. Goldleaf’s developers aim to transform land into “one more high-end subdivision full of ‘luxury’ homes that look like they were made of cottage cheese, like they were imitation castles in a cheap amusement park.”
He knocks on the door of a charming ramshackle house that Goldleaf hopes to purchase. A man who “looked like a living skeleton” answers the door, invites Nate in, and presents him to his wife who has “been like to have a fit waiting on you to get here.”
The home feels familiar: a parlor with old wallpaper peeling off the wall, a wingback chair, a Mason jar full of tea “so sweet he’d have sworn he could feel his teeth start to come loose from his gums.” While visiting this simultaneously bewitching and creepy couple, smells waft over Nate that he cannot quite place– smells that are a little good and a little bad. His nose is filled “with something rich and bittersweet, with a little of the rot of pluff mud, a little of the sting of salt.”
The ancient ghost-like pair implores Nate to listen to the stories they tell about the surrounding land. They try to root him in the past instead of literally bulldozing into the future. They beseech: “The thing is, son, you need to hear these stories, and you need to try to really hear them. You need these stories. You needed them long since.”
The longer Nate stays in the house, the more he feels glued or rooted to the ground, mesmerized– and terrified– by the stories and what they mean for him. The stories are warning Nate– and us– that we are lost and are losing our connection to the past. If we don’t pay attention, we are in danger of losing something fundamental.
Spoiler alert: Goldleaf wins. The old farmhouse is torn down, the old growth forests and old farm fields obliterated. What replaces the old farmhouse, old tobacco fields, and old growth trees is a development full of “hectic gables and peaks without need or reason, gaping facades without balance or symmetry or beauty.” But Nate is changed, his eyes open to what happens when we ignore the stories calling us.
Like any good campfire ghost story, you’ll finish this book having had a good tale. There are belly laughs, startling surprises, and more than enough haunting moments. But Southern and some of our state’s great authors give us something deeper and decidedly unsettling, uprooting us from our comfort zones.
So as the nights grow longer and the weather takes on a chill, snuggle up with “The Devil’s Done Come Back.” Like Nate, you might feel more aware and grounded in the present through these stories that take us to the cobwebby past and beyond. It’s a fine North Carolina way to celebrate the season — and you might just discover that our ghosts have a lot more to say than “boo.”
D.G. Martin, a lawyer, retired as UNC system vice president for public affairs in 1997. He hosted PBC-NC’s “North Carolina Bookwatch,” for more than 20 years, along with “Who’s Talking with D.G. Martin” on 97.9 The Hill.
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