Billy Coffey’s “There Will Be Stars”

I’ve read all of Bill Coffey’s novels, from Snow Day (2010) to The Curse of Crow Hollow (2015). And I’ve watched his work grow and develop and take on a shape both unexpected and delightful.

And now comes novel #7: There Will Be Stars.

Coffey’s been bending genres for some time now, moving from general fiction to more speculative. There Will Be Stars almost defies categorization. It is speculative. It is suspense. It is mystery. It is imagination. It is faith. But it’s also something else.

It’s what I would call literary.

Coffey has been moving in this direction, but There Will Be Stars plants a flag.

The story: Bobby Barnes, the official town drunk in the small Southern mountain town of Mattingly, wakes up one morning, thinking through the recurring nightmare of the night before. His twin sons Matthew and Mark accompany him to the local filling station for gas and beer. After an altercation with the station owner and the sheriff, he heads to another filling station, where he runs into Junior Hewitt, a kind of bully who lives in the past glory of a minor league baseball game. Junior hears Bobby say something about Junior going fishing – an ordinary statement in and of itself – but Junior realizes Bobby has seen something unexpected – the future. And junior knows what that means.

Junior grabs Bobby and takes him to the house of the Widow Cash, who has just started lunch with a few friends – a young boy named Tommy, a young woman named Laura Beth who wears sunglasses all the time, the retired high school teacher George, and the Methodist preacher Juliet Creech. Gradually Bobby comes to understand that the people sitting around that table are dead, reliving the last day of their lives in an endless loop. It’s a loop called “The Turn.”

Billy Coffey

And Bobby realizes something else: he’s in his own Turn. And that must mean he’s dead.

This is not a story about zombies. It is a story about sin and redemption. It is a story about how the spiritual and the real are interwoven in daily life. It’s a story that’s powerfully written, with a command of the narrative that is amazing.

It is also a literary work. As readable as it is, it lifts the reader to a higher place. We move out from what is simply a good story and discover ourselves in a different place altogether. Great fiction aims for this, and There Will Be Stars succeeds at it.

Related: My reviews of Coffey’s books

Snow Day (2010)

Paper Angels (2011)

When Mockingbirds Sing (2013)

The Devil Walks in Mattingly (2014)

In the Heart of the Dark Wood (2014)

The Curse of Crow Hollow (2015)

Photograph by Jonathan Norris via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Billy Coffey’s “The Curse of Crow Hollow”

It begins normally enough: a small group of teenagers plan a slightly disobedient get-together up by long-abandoned mines up in the mountains. By the time the night is done, the small town of Crow Hollow will be under a curse, a curse that leads to hysteria, destruction, and death.

This is Billy Coffey’s The Curse of Crow Hollow. It is a dark tale, unremitting and unrelenting, a story that builds to a series of climaxes that will leave the town devastated, and reader with chewed fingernails.

The story centers on five families: Bucky Vest works at the town dump, while his wife Angela watches television soap operas and daughter Cordelia believes she’s in love with Hays Foster. Hays parents, Landis and Kayann, own the local grocery store. Mayor Bickford and his daughter Sharon still mourn the death of his wife and her mother. David Ramsay is the church pastor; at home is his wife Belle and daughter Naomi, while his son John David stays with Chessie and Briar Hodge, the town’s suppliers of moonshine.

The teens stumble into Alvaretta Graves, long rumored to be a witch. A confrontation ends with Scarlett striking Alvaretta, who speaks a curse on the teens and the town. And the curse begins immediately.

It’s Coffey’s darkest tale yet and, I would argue, his best. It’s been a pleasure to watch his writing grow and develop. This is a story that would be difficult for any writer to keep command over, moving as it does through the main characters, minor characters, side stories and secrets buried in the past. But Coffey does it, and does it well.

Billy Coffey

This story is a far cry from his first two novels, Snow Day and Paper Angels. The turn toward dark tales began with When Mockingbirds Sing, followed by The Devil Walks in Mattingly and In the Heart of the Dark Wood. The last three are set in the same general area of the Blue Ridge Mountains as The Curse of Crow Hollow.

Of particular note is the unnamed narrator, who speaks with a Southern accent and a voice that is both knowledgeable and yet almost chilling. Who is this? It’s a man, likely an elderly man, but his identity isn’t revealed until the end.

With The Curse of Crow Hollow, Billy Coffey is breaking new ground. He’s moved in a more literary direction. He has plumbed the depths of the emotions and realities of small town life. And what he’s best known for – telling simple but great stories about ordinary people – is in full flower.

Photograph by Junior Libby via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Bill Coffey’s “In the Heart of the Dark Wood”

After reading In the Heart of the Dark Wood by Billy Coffey, I almost fell into the mistake of thinking it was just another great story by a favorite writer, a sequel to another great story, The Devil Walks in Mattingly. And it is both a great story and a sequel, but that’s not all it is.

It took several days of thinking about it before I realized what this novel actually is.

It’s been two years since the great tornado destroyed most of the town of Mattingly. All of dead have been accounted for, except one – Mary Granderson, mother to Allie. Her body has never been found; what lies in her grave is the only thing that could be found – her pink tennis shoe. Allie had turned inward, becoming almost a different person. Her father has turned to the bottle.

Allie believes her mother is still alive. She discovers one morning, a few days before Christmas, that the Mary of the nativity set in the front yard is missing. She believes her father has taken it. She has to find it, and she has to find her mother. The little toy compass that her mother had given her the day of the storm suddenly starts working again. And Allie believes it is pointing to her mother.

She enlists her friend Zach Barnett, the son of the sheriff (a main character in The Devil Walks in Mattingly), to help locate the missing Nativity figure. And off they go, biking toward where the compass is telling Allie to go, toward the great woods. She doesn’t tell Zach what the real object of their search actually is. They enter the woods, and they will not return for four days.

Coffey is a master at building and sustaining the tension of the story, knowing there has to be breaks (or else the reader might collapse). But the focus is Allie and Zach, accompanied by Allie’s dog, and the reader soon learns they are walking into a place of evil – and that they are being hunted, and herded.

It would be easy to consider In the Heart of the Dark Wood as a well-written, engaging suspense story. But the idea of the dark woods, and the evil that lurked within in, suggest this story is something else. Haunted by the images and descriptions of the woods, I spent time thinking about what they represented.

Billy Coffey

It was the characters of two children on the cusp of their teen years that finally led me to a conclusion. The woods, those dark and forbidding woods hiding evil and danger, are allegorical. One can read the story, in fact, as an allegory – an allegory of the dark places that exist within each of us, the battle that goes one between innocence and darkness, a battle that leads one to a kind of internal confrontation, the confrontation with self. For that’s what both Zach and Allie ultimately have to confront – the confrontation within themselves, the confession that they must make to themselves about who they are and what they are and aren’t capable of doing.

It’s more than recognizable. The story of Allie and Zach is the story of each of us, knowing that we have to come to grips with failure, with falling short, that we will not measure up by depending upon ourselves.

Coffey is moving his prodigious storytelling abilities to another level. Read In the Heart of the Dark Wood, and you’ll discover it.

Photograph by Tim Emerich via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

“The Devil Walks in Mattingly” by Billy Coffey

Life in a small town: Kate, the girl voted most popular in high school, marries Jake Barnett, the son of the “big name” sheriff. The years pass. They have a six-year-old son. Jake becomes sheriff, his father having left town after committing a crime. Still, life should be close to idyllic. Except Kate has become almost manic about helping people, and Jake is having nightmares. The past is about to catch up with them, the past being an 18-year-old boy named Philip.

Both Jake and Kate believe they killed him.

Unexpectedly, the past is midwifed by Taylor Hathcock, who with an accomplice robs a gas station, kills a teenager, and then robs a second gas station. He’s whisked away by teenager Lucy Seekins in her BMW. Lucy watched the mayhem from her father’s home perched on the hill above, and pulls up just in time to get Taylor away from the crime scene. Taylor didn’t ask to be saved; Lucy hadn’t intended to become an accessory after the fact. Large things turn on unintended decisions. Taylor has her drive to Happy Hollow, the misnamed primeval forest with its wood full of eyes, menace, and unspeakable things.

The past is indeed coming back. It will not be ignored.

Welcome to Mattingly. The devil is walking here.

Billy Coffey’s new novel The Devil Walks in Mattingly is a dark, enthralling tale, dark for the emotions and sins it plumbs and enthralling because Coffey is a born storyteller, and a master storyteller at that (just follow his blog, What I Learned Today, and you’ll see for yourself). At numerous points in the story I became convinced that that the characters had all passed beyond redemption, but Coffey kept me reading. I’m glad he did.

His earlier works of fiction, and especially When Mockingbirds Sing, hint at this, but in The Devil Walks in Mattingly Coffey makes open use of the “extra-normal.” The novel is not a tale of the supernatural, but certain elements certainly lean in that direction.

The characters are all recognizable -- flawed individuals struggling to understand life and trying to put the past behind them. The villain, Taylor Hathcock, becomes a kind of anti-hero, drawn with care and compassion. He may well be the most engaging character in the story, in fact. He’s certainly the most self-assured character, understanding both his strengths and weaknesses, that is, until Lucy turns life upside down.

This theme of redemptive love shapes the story, giving it both its power and plausibility. We see redemptive love working itself out across generations, across relationships, even across the living and the dead. Each character is affected, involved, and ultimately transformed. But not all transformations end well.

The Devil Walks in Mattingly is Coffey’s most ambitious, and most successful, story yet. Given the quality of his previous works, that’s saying quite a lot.

Related – my reviews of Billy Coffey’s books:

Snow Day

Paper Angels

When Mockingbirds Sing

Photograph of a small town by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Billy Coffey’s “When Mockingbirds Sing”

Billy Coffey is a storyteller, one of the best writing today. Even more, he’s a natural storyteller, the words seemingly rolling right on to the page. To read a story by Coffey is to sit in a diner, preferably somewhere in South, and listen while waitresses refill coffee cups and slide a bit of lemon meringue pie across the table in your direction. And the stories do come.

Coffey’s first novel, Snow Day, told the story of a man facing the loss of his job when it snows, giving jobs and loss of jobs a brief respite. It’s a day when he will learn what’s truly important, simply by considering the stories of the people he runs into.

His second novel, Paper Angels, involves a man recovering from an injury in a hospital, and a visitor arrives to help him sort through a box of what looks like utterly worthless things. But each thing has a story, and the man watches his own story unfold as the box is sorted.

And now there’s When Mockingbirds Sing. It’s ambitious. It goes beyond, well beyond, the weaving of interrelated stories of his first two books, to become a unified story, a large story with a large theme. Through the characters in the town of Mattingly, Coffey lays open the questions of what is faith, what is doubt, what is prophecy, and what happens when they collide in the lives or people.

Tom and Ellen Norcross and their daughter Leah have moved to Mattingly, both to seek reduced pressures from Tom’s counseling workload and to repair a marriage that is not doing well. Their daughter Leah is a quiet child with a stutter, and with something else – an imaginary friend she calls the Rainbow Man, who inspires here to paint extraordinary pictures.

Leah says the Rainbow Man has told her to give the first picture to Barney Moore, who cares for his stroke-paralyzed wife Mabel. Barney sees numbers painted on the picture, bets the numbers in the lottery and comes up a winner with $250 million. When he announces what happens at church, life in Mattingly begins to blow apart, and Leah finds herself both sought after and reviled. Her one friend, Allie Granderson, sticks by her, however (and the character of Allie is drawn so well that she threatens to steal the story at times).

Then Leah paints another picture, one no one can figure out. But it is a sign of something that’s coming, something bad, and everyone’s lives will be changed because of it.

While Leah (and Allie) sit at the center of the story, Coffey has drawn a fine supporting cast – the legalistic deacon, the pastor impressed with his own success, a father who rejects faith because of the damage he believes it’s caused in the lives of the people he counsels, a mother who in her loneliness is turning to alcohol, the small-town sheriff. Together they move toward what the Rainbow Man has told Leah will come.

It’s an ambitious novel, and it works, and works well. Coffey has aimed at large themes, and hit them with a practiced eye. These are bedrock themes, especially for people of faith, and Coffey doesn’t duck the hard questions. He’s written When Mockingbirds Sing strong and true, and we tackle the hard questions with him.

Photograph: Northern Mockingbird, courtesy Birder’s Lounge.

Reading Billy Coffey

One of the stories in Billy Coffey’s new novel Paper Angels is about 9/11. It’s not about what happened on 9/11, but more about how the central character in the book, Andy Sommerville, reacts to a foreigner while watching the lighting of the annual town Christmas tree. The story is full of symbols – the tree, the season, why the foreigner (a German) hides something in the tree (you have to read it to find out).

Like good writing has a tendency to do, that story reminded me of something else: my own family’s Christmas after 9/11. I was supposed to have flown to Eastern Europe for a missions trip that October; the trip was delayed until the following spring. The economy was starting to reel. War was starting against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. We were still feeling the effects – physical, emotional and even spiritual effects – of the deaths in the twin towers, the Pentagon, and that field in Pennsylvania.

That Christmas, the first Lord of the Rings movies opened in theaters. The Fellowship of the Ring would have been a good movie at any time, mostly because of how true it stayed to J.R.R. Tolkien’s original book and because of director Peter Jackson’s imagination. Jackson got it almost exactly right. But that year, that Christmas, the movie became something more than just a good movie. It became a kind of passage from what we had all been before to what we were becoming, or what we might become. My youngest son and I saw the movie four times in the theater.

However blissfully unaware we might have been before 9/11, Osama bin Laden taught America a lesson – but not the one he wanted to teach. No, the lesson he taught America was that, like The Fellowship of the Ring so clearly demonstrated, evil walks this world. Forces of evil would gleefully destroy the good if they could. On 9/11, forces of evil were determined to do just that, bankrolled by a rich man whose money came from his father.

In the movie and its sequels, the fate of Middle Earth rests first on a small group of men, an elf, a dwarf, a wizard and four hobbits, and then only on the shoulders of two hobbits. They continue on, against impossible odds, because, as Gandalf the wizard says, “It is what we do with the time we have” that matters.

That could be a theme of Coffey’s Paper Angels. If you believe in God as Billy Coffey does and as I do, what matters is the time we have. During that time we are being fashioned into the people we were created to be. That doesn’t mean life is always understandable. It’s not. Many things are unfair. Many things don’t make sense. Senseless tragedies happen. People die because some evil mind in the mountains of Afghanistan wants to make a point and thinks he has to destroy something.

Sometimes we feel like hobbits, struggling through the mines of Moria, or the dead zone before the land of Sauron, or the cave with the giant spider. We seem so small, so insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

And yet we matter. We are part of something larger than ourselves. We have a part to play. We are being hammered and sculpted into something better. The anvil often hurts; the chisel cuts and chips. Sometimes it feels like everything cracks and shatters.

That’s what happens to Andy Sommerville in Paper Angels. The power of Coffey’s writing and stories is that we are each our own version of Andy. We recognize him because we are him.

And out of the pain and the hurt and the tragedy will come something good, something new, something beautiful, because the something comes from God.

Related:

My review of Paper Angels.

Billy Coffey's "Paper Angels"

Billy Coffey tells stories. He’s a master at telling stories. To understand why is to understand Coffey’s second novel, Paper Angels.

It’s not that Coffey was born to tell stories. That’s important, but it’s not really what matters.

What matters are the stories themselves.

Andy Sommerville is in the hospital, recovering from some kind of attack that involved Andy being burned. A counselor named Elizabeth is sent to help him sort through what’s happened and what he needs to do.

Together, Andy and Elizabeth sort through a box containing 12 items, most of which look worthless. A cap. Some napkins from Dairy Queen. Part of a fingernail painted red. A wad of chewed gum. A slingshot. A key chain. A few other things.

Monetarily worthless. Yet these are the things that Elizabeth and Andy will use to make sense of Andy’s life, and where he goes next. As worthless as they might seem, they represent what matters in Andy’s life. And they are important.

Coffey uses the stories to construct a larger story, the story of Andy Sommerville but also the story of each of us. We all have those major events we think of as the important milestones of our lives – marriage, graduations, births, deaths, recognitions, honors. In between the milestones are a lot of living and a lot of life – and that’s where we find the stories.

It’s in those stories we discover what really matters about our lives and ourselves, because the stories of our lives are what we are meant to be. And this is Coffey territory. This is the landscape he draws and paints, a landscape composed of both place and people.

This is the landscape Andy Sommerville travels. Those souvenirs in the box are more than artifacts and reminders. They are the DNA of a life.

No one describes that DNA better than Billy Coffey. No one.

Related:

My review of Billy Coffey’s first novel, Snow Day.

Bill Coffey blogs at What I Learned Today.

Winners for “Snow Day” Giveaway

Last week, I announced a giveaway – actually, two giveaways – of the novel Snow Day by Billy Coffey. The deadline was last night at 11:59 p.m. The clock ticked down to the deadline (does a clock tick down or up?). And then it was time.

I did the random selection the scientifically random way to do it. I number the comments, wrote numbers of slips of paper, put the slips in a hat, and without looking, drew one. The winner of the random drawing turned out to be Barbara Brinkman, who has now been sent an email with the news.

The selection for the second giveaway was totally subjective. I asked who would you give this book to (if not yourself), and there were great responses. The one I decided upon was Sean’s, who wrote this:

“Honestly, I would read the book myself and give it to my mother and step-father to read for Christmas. I think it could help them open up and talk about the rough times they've had over the past decade (ok, that's short...but i can't be short :-) if you want, read on to see why I would use the book in this way).

“I grew up in a small factory town in Indiana, and over the past 10 years I've watched >90% of the factory jobs disappear. In the lead-up to the death of the factory part of the town, I heard (I am ~800 miles away in college) several stories of people racking up debt in anticipation for bankruptcy, taking extended unpaid vacations, and yes, even wishing for snow days - all in an attempt to, in my opinion, fill the existing cracks of brokenness in an hopes of propping themselves up for the heavy events to come. Even though nearly everyone in my family was personally affected by the loss of a factory job and I heard and saw the devastation myself, I would love to read Snow Day, as it seems like it would give me a new, fresh insight into the events that took place in my small Indiana town, and maybe even give me new ways to help my family open up about their brokenness.”

Sean, if you will send me your contact information, I will get a copy of Snow Day on its way to you.

Thanks to all who participated.

A "Snow Day" Giveaway, or Two

Did I happen to mention that I like Billy Coffey’s novel Snow Day?

Yes, I reviewed it here (and on Amazon). I even wrote about the “stickiness” of Billy’s stories for a post about another book. And a couple of people have figured out that I liked Snow Day enough to add the badge for the book on the right side of the blog here, and no one asked me to do that.

More people should read this book. It’s fine and it’s true and it tells the stories of people in a small town in Virginia at the same time it’s telling all of our stories.

I like this book so much I’m giving away two copies.

To be eligible for a random drawing for one copy, simply leave a comment here (and, I hope, a way to contact you) or on my Facebook page post on the giveaway. I will pull a name out of a hat and send the winner a copy. That’s it. The comment can be as simple as “Hi" and a way to contact you.

To be eligible for both the random drawing and a drawing based upon a totally subjective judgment by me, add a short (one or two sentences) statement about whom you would like to give a copy of Snow Day to for Christmas. You don’t actually have to give that person a copy, but just briefly explain why you would. Example: “I’d like to give a copy of Snow Day to my dad because he grew up in a small town just like the one in the book.” I’ll pick a winner and send the copy.

All comments due by 11:59 p.m. central time, Tuesday, Nov. 23. I’ll post the winners' names on Wednesday the 24th.

And even if your name isn’t selected at random or chosen for the second copy, you should still read this book.