ASHES RAIN DOWN
There is a sense of shared destiny in the mountain community of Sluggards Creek in a future that seems more like a return to the past. Shared crisis creates a tissue of interconnection as characters hang on by a thread: no food in the stores, no electricity, civil disorder. Stories mostly share the same characters and locales, so it is both a story collection and something of a novel. The deaths of loved ones in The Forever War and from disease and natural disaster reverberate in the putative death of the earth. Each story presents some new crisis; collective troubles are reflected in individual troubles as holocaust in the outside world engenders personal holocaust. But, in the end, the stories are about people dealing with personal conflicts and the vagaries of their lives, with the larger environmental issues providing a dramatic backdrop against which those lives play out.
Challenged by unforseen predicaments, characters must rely on their wits and on strengths they didn’t know they had to hold on in the face of disaster–plagues of flies, exotic diseases, fire and wind storms, drought followed by ceaseless rains…the world coming undone. Although there is a sense of impending doom here, there is also much dark humor and a zany spice of grotesque realism.
In the title story, “Ashes Rain Down,” fires burn all sides as Lawr Connery drives the lesbian couple Margie and Carlie to Oregon along nearly impassable highways to bury Carlie’s dead mother and confront family dysfunction and a brother who hates her. To free herself from the past’s conflagrations, Carlie sets the house she has inherited ablaze with her mother’s body inside it. A plague of biting flies brings an infestation of hatred to Sluggard’s Creek in “Fly-bitten.” Living alone in an isolated old farm house in the desert beyond the mountains, Dee has unexpected visitors in “Out There.” A salt pine falls on her house, then a family of drifting marauders invades it, stealing her stash of supplies. She befriends the boy Lester, who is abused by his Charlie Manson look-alike father, Alf. We revisit Lester’s “wanderer” family in “Family Life,” encamped in an abandoned suburban development in Bakersfield next door to his aunt’s house. His father, Alf, takes up with his sister-in-law whose husband has died in The Forever War. When his wife confronts him, Alf attacks her, and Lester defends his mother, incredulous at summoning the courage to stand up to his bullying “pops.”
Praise for Ashes Rain Down:
“While comparisons to Cormac McCarthy’s powerful The Road novel seem inevitable, William Luvaas’s brilliant new collection of short stories, Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle, is a wildly inventive and epic comedy of prophetic visions, and a masterpiece of fiction for our own modern times….Luvaas manages to weave ten stories into a moving, gripping and often hilarious journey of wily characters—friends, lovers and conflicted family members—attempting to navigate the demands of a crumbling world. In a year of extreme climate disruptions, Luvaas’s stories should be required reading—if only as a reminder of the never-ending quest for food, water, fuel, redemption, understanding, love—and sex—in a world shattered by the ‘forever war,’ unrelenting natural disasters and unleashed civil disorder, and the power of storytelling to bring some sense and laugh-out-loud humor to the pieces.”
– Jeff Biggers, Huffington Post – “Book of the Year”: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/book-of-the-year-ashes-ra_b_4458646.html
“The Style and mixture of voices used throughout these ten tightly linked offerings suggests Flannery O’Connor’s eccentrics channeling the apocalyptic visions of Cormac McCarthy (if McCarthy had a sense of humor) laced with brilliant absurdities that might also be labeled eerie ecstasies, the musings of a gifted ironist, a jubilantly dark comedian, a compelling writer whose mind is filled with prophetic visions about a future entirely possible–credibly even inevitable.”
– Duff Brenna, author of The Law of Falling Bodies
LA Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/end-of-days-on-luvaass-ashes-rain-down/
“Ashes Rain Down is holy-smokes brilliant, ten connected stories of the apocalypse that are sharp and filthy and gut-bustingly funny to boot. I’ve been shouting it for years, but now I’ll shout it louder: William Luvaas, my friends, is a wild-eyed genius.”
– Lauren Groff, author of The Monsters of Templeton, Delicate Edible Birds, and Arcadia
“Ashes Rain Down is a perfect title for this collection, which captures the landscape of this place, where ashes do rain down in a terrible and comical and beautiful way….The people who populate this book are singular, hilarious, melancholy, but always compelling and always right on target. The voices are enjoyable and Mr. Luvaas knows them well.”
– Susan Straight, Author of Between Heaven and Here and Highwire Moon
“It is one of the best contemporary short stories I have ever read. The voice is extraordinary. I’m not quite sure how you can achieve the rural vernacular through the body of the work and then end with a long passage that is beautifully articulate with a tone and vocabulary that rises into elegance….The plot is complex and evocative. The tone frequently shifts from the truly comic to the hauntingly serious. Few authors can do that. There are echoes of Faulkner here, but the story maintains its literary independence. What a joy to read a story that is such a fresh and inventive use of the form.”
– Stephen Minot, author of Three Genres: The Writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Drama and Surviving The Flood (A personal note to the author about “Ashes Rain Down,” the title story)
“Luvaas leans toward the apocalyptic, but he also comes across as a guardian of folk tales, fairytales, and ghost stories. Time is running out for the characters, yet their stories are not depressing; they are enchanting, touching, amusing, even comical. Underneath runs a current of warning over a sigh of resignation.”
– Karen Dahood, Bookpleasures.com: http://www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/articles/5668/1/Ashes-Rain-Down-A-Story-Cycle-Reviewed-by-Karen-Dahood-of-Bookpleasures.com/page1.html
“The collection is strangely uplifting despite the operatic landscape of desolation that pervades every aspect of these characters’ lives….The writing style is poetic but also refreshingly crisp. Some stories echo elements of magic realism, layering the collection with an unsettling, almost cathartic energy.”
– Shoilee Khan, Foreword Reviews: https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/ashes-rain-down/
“I appreciate the way the stories end, as each day of our lives ends, with some ups, some downs, some hope, some despair. A lot of mourning and craziness. It’s not the kind of harrowing, nearly unrelieved horror of, say, Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD. There are a reasonable number of people who still consider themselves part of a community, willing to help each other, at least occasionally. Displaced killer hordes are rumored to be coming from the abandoned cities, but they never show up. A family of trashy wanderers moves in on a lone woman, but they are mostly violent to each other.”
– Meredith Sue Willis, Books For Readers: www.meredithsuewillis.com/bfrarchive_156-160.html #issue159
READ AN EXCERPT FROM ASHES RAIN DOWN
“OUT THERE” excerpt
William Luvaas’s new collection: ASHES RAIN DOWN: A Story Cycle
“OUT THERE”
A Short Story
A loud crack–more of a pop really–woke Dee from the morning sleep that was so delicious to her lately, since she often didn’t nod off until just before dawn. She rushed outside in her gown (no one to see her, after all), knowing what it must be. Another pop as she went out the back door. “Bad,” she cried, “awful bad!” Stumbling backward away from the house in bare feet, she watched one half of the huge salt pine split away from the main trunk and go down atop her roof with a slow groan. “Not the house! My God! Not my house!” Incredibly, the old two story structure held the weight of half that split trunk, thick as a barrel, which lay now across the roof peak, stout branches flopping down either side. It dented the roof and half obscured the south side of the house, left an ugly white scar where it had torn away from the tree. “Poor thing,” Dee whispered, not knowing whether she meant the tree or her house.
A branch snapped in the mesquite thicket. Not a coyote; they moved silently. Just the tree. She knew it unlikely for a person to be way out here this time of night–any time, for that matter–believed she could hear the roof moan in cellulose agony, similar to the agony of the tree. Then, with a great whoosh and splintering of timbers, the tree broke through into the attic. Dee watched dust snake out that hole in her roof, opened her mouth to taste it as it floated down wind toward her, the re-cent past coating her tongue: my fiftieth birthday, my drinking days with Tripp Henry, moving out here to the desert…the Petersons dying here on the place, the time their boy set the house afire…on back before the turn of the century (this one of the oldest homesteads in the Coachella), and eons before that–the taste of time itself, alkaline and chalky, older than God.