A RIGHT OF PASSAGE TOWARD ACCEPTANCE AND UNDERSTANDING

a review by Betina Entzminger

BETINA ENTZMINGER earned her PhD at UNC Chapell Hill and is a Professor of English at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Belle Gone Bad: White Southern Women Writers and the Dark Seductress (Louisiana State University Press, 2002) and Contemporary Reconfigurations of American Literary Classics (Routledge Press, 2017). Her latest book is a memoir, The Beak in the Heart: True Tales of Misfit Southern Women (Rivercliff Books, 2021).

MEGAN MIRANDA has authored six Young Adult novels and seven psychological thrillers, including The Last House Guest (Simon and Schuster, 2019) and The Perfect Stranger (Simon and Schuster, 2017), which were New York Times bestsellers. She grew up in New Jersey, attended MIT, and then pursued a career in the biotech industry in Boston before moving to North Carolina, where she pursued her writing career in earnest.

A small town with a big secret buried in its past. A young female narrator digging for the truth. These are staples in Megan Miranda’s mystery thrillers, ones we find again in her latest novel, The Last to Vanish. Like Miranda’s 2016 novel, All the Missing Girls, this latest book is set in a fictional town in North Carolina, Cutter’s Pass in this case. One of the best aspects of the novel is this strong, believable, and fully developed female narrator, Abby Lovett, who is not seeking, nor does she find, a romantic partner. The candid, journallike voice in which she speaks directly to the reader makes her likeable and engaging. The novel also features other strong women characters, including Celeste, hotel owner and Abby’s mentor, and Rochelle, the sheriff’s right hand. In addition, the natural-sounding dialogue and accessible, lively writing make the book an enjoyable read.

Cutter’s Pass sits near the Appalachian Trail, which makes the scenic Passage Inn, where Abby has lived and worked for the past ten years, a stopover for hiking enthusiasts. The town is not best known for its views, though. Rather, it is notorious for the mysterious disappearances of six people at intervals over the last twenty-five years. The first to vanish were a group of young men, dubbed the fraternity four, who set off from Cutter’s Pass on a hiking adventure in 1997 and were never seen or heard from again. In 2012, college student and experienced hiker Alice Kelly also disappeared without a trace after a last siting at the local tavern. Two others, Farrah Jordan in 2019 and Landon West in 2022, go missing, the last one seemingly from the inn itself. The novel begins when Landon’s brother, Trey, checks in to the Passage Inn looking for clues, drawing Abby and the reader into his quest.

Of course, the disappearances had been investigated by the police, but to no avail. Trey West and, increasingly, Abby can’t help feeling that the locals are hiding something. This tension between insider and outsider serves as a key theme and driving force throughout the novel. The hotel’s name itself, The Passage Inn, is at once a kitschy reference to the nearby Appalachian Trail sought by tourists and a subtler suggestion of Abby’s passage beyond the community’s protective social boundaries. Even though she has lived there for a decade, Abby still feels that she has not been accepted into the community’s trust: “I’d realized that Cutter’s Pass would only exist for you in the parts you were here for, and the rest would remain an impenetrable history. I’d learned that I’d find more camaraderie and friendship in those that were like me – not from here” (125). Abby discovers, though, that even the locals leave much unspoken among themselves.

Abby’s desire for acceptance competes against her desire for truth. Secrets are kept for a reason, and the possibility of exposing what others want hidden provides the novel’s sense of danger. Yet at times, rather than organically developing this suspense, the novel works too hard to tell us there is something sinister about the town, and the suspense seems unearned: “Something was wrong. Of course something was wrong. Something was very wrong here. I understood that. We must’ve all understood that, on some level, whether we wanted to face it” (62).

Another important theme the novel develops, which makes it feel more like a Southern novel despite its author’s New Jersey origins (she now lives in North Carolina), is the con- nectedness of past and present. Cutter’s Pass, Abby tells us, is a “place where the present slipped effortlessly into the past” (105) and where “[t]he past had a thousand ways in” (243) to the present. A recurring plot device throughout the book is the inn’s capricious internet and phone connections, which suggests its isolation from the modern world. The novel’s figurative ghosts, however, overcome these obstacles and adapt to social media, computer, and cell phone technology. Miranda expertly conveys the past’s collective haunting of both long-time locals and would-be insider, Abby.

The novel also inevitably touches on the beauty and danger of nature. The mountain location, its streams and views, draws hikers to Cutter’s Pass, but it can also trap them. Near the novel’s close, Abby describes the trail leading from the Inn in this way: “We’d just passed the curve, where you turn around, and the trees and rhododendron have already closed around you in a tunnel of shadows, and you can’t see your way back out” (318). The author could have made even more use of the beautiful natural setting; only a few scenes take place on the mountain itself. Instead, it focuses mainly on the human structures, both physical and social, which can be an even greater danger.

The resolution of The Last to Vanish is complex and largely satisfying. The best mystery endings are surprises that ultimately feel somehow inevitable. The reader thinks, Of course! It all makes sense now. Why didn’t I see it? For the most part, this mystery’s solution felt right in just that way. Yet, a few more breadcrumbs along the way would have made the ending nearly perfect. n

2022 James Applewhite Poetry Prize Semifinalist

BY ALMYR L. BUMP

Mules pull plows, small hooves, eat less than horses. Sterile.

I plowed an acre, peanuts, with a Joe Harrow and bridle.

Son, keep him straight.

Sharp backbone and huge muscles drive mules built for field work.

Pull tobacco sleds from field to barn, fresh and ready to haul.

You got to keep him straight. with a “Git Up” and a “Gee Haw” pin eyes to that line, the harvest in mind. In the field hoeing, weeds dug down.

Wear sleeves cuttin okree.

Wake up, momma; turn the lamp down low. Y’all come eat and see that my grave is kept clean.

DONALD SEXAUER (1932–2003) was born in Erie, PA. He studied at William and Mary in the early 1950s, received a BFA from Edinboro State College in 1957, and received an MFA from Kent State University in 1960. Shortly after, he was appointed Professor of Printmaking at ECU where he helped develop the printmaking and art programs. In 1971, he volunteered as an Army artist in Vietnam. He retired from ECU after more than forty years of teaching in 2002. His work appears in numerous private and public collections, including the Mint Museum in Charlotte, the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian in DC, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. See more at Gallery C in Raleigh.

ALMYR L. BUMP is a native of Dobson in Surry County, NC, and an infantry officer with both enlisted and commissioned service. He currently works as a regional response planner for NORTHCOM Homeland Region I. His work appeared most recently in Proud to Be: Vol. 9; Consequence, and Free State Review.

2022 James Applewhite Poetry Prize Semifinalist

BY JOANNE DURHAM

Interference

I can still trace the crinkles around the wise eyes of Robert Young, the father in Father Knows Best, who never lost his temper, arrived home after work eager to settle each family crisis. Wednesday nights, late 1950s, Mom, Dad, my sister, and I watched on our black and white TV with its stiff rabbit ears.

Almost every scene took place inside the home, teenage daughter flung across her bed in tears, mother aproned in the kitchen. If the camera strayed as far as the malt shop, we only saw vanilla faces, able bodies, pony-tailed girls in shirtwaist dresses. No shadow of polio or the hydrogen bomb.

Jim Crow held the camera steady, not even a glimpse of Black kids playing tag on the other side of town. Those images hovered behind horizontal lines called interference that would suddenly distort our view. My father fiddled with the antenna, unscrewed the pressboard back and tightened tubes, until Father and son Bud came strolling out of the garage, wiped grease off their hands, and smiled. Relieved, we all settled back on the couch. It took me years to learn to adjust the signals I received, to clear the static, the white noise, to listen with open ears.

JOANNE DURHAM is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl (Evening Street Press, 2022), which received the Sinclair Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, On Shifting Shoals, about the North Carolina beach town where she lives, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. She was a finalist for the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Poet Laureate Award and the NC State Poetry Contest. Her poems have or will appear in Poetry East, Flying South, Poetry in Plain Sight, Calyx, Kosmos Quarterly, among other literary magazines

Rutherford, NC, native BRANDON CORDREY is a mixed media collage artist living in Raleigh, NC. He earned his BFA in painting and drawing from East Carolina University and during his time at ECU worked at the Greenville Museum of Art. As an arts administrator, he has worked with three galleries, two museums, and multiple arts nonprofits and was most recently the Executive Director of VAE Raleigh.

2022 James Applewhite Poetry Prize Finalist

BY JAMAL MICHEL

Any Adjectives for Divorce

There’s no more Carolina Wrens in the backyard.

Their old bath, a small divot of dried leaves, impregnating space. There’s green coming soon, on the edges of that old divot.

I lost an hour of my 31st birthday to some 19th-century asshole.

But here, in my father’s backyard, nothing looks completely dead yet.

The faucet, a hoseless respite for the few thirsty coal skinks.

JAMAL MICHEL’s Afro-Caribbean roots inform his writing, which include representation in politics, film and television, and video games. He’s the former video game editor for The Nerds of Color blog and has been covering gaming and pop culture news for the last few years. He received his MFA from NC State, and his work has been published in The Missouri Review , the minnesota review , Apogee Journal , and Linden Avenue Journal. He has also written commentary for The Miami Herald and The News & Observer and has served as a columnist for Duke and NC State.

I read a synonym for the adjective blue is vulgar, or obscene.

My mother said all she ever wanted was my father to leave, pack his indiscretions in a leather case.

But he only carries oil paintings in them now, one of two twisted faces he says is a self-portrait.

Like mom, I know when he’s lying: there’s no paint blue enough for our obscenities.

Like all children, I never asked to be made in the image of my parents’ crusades.

Nigerian-born and Seattle-based DIMEJI ONAFUWA is an artist, designer, researcher, educator, and speaker. He earned a BA with honors in Advertising/Design and Studio Art from Concord University, an MBA in Management from UNC Charlotte, and a PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. He has been invited to speak at conferences and on podcasts and to facilitate workshops globally on topics as varied as art, alternative economics, transition design, diversity and inclusion in design, the commons, allyship, and algorithmic bias. In North Carolina, he owned the Charlotte-based visual communications firm Casajulie, and he also worked with the Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte. His art is held in private and public collections and have been exhibited widely in the US and Nigeria.