Screaming With the Cannibals by Lee Maynard (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS Lee Maynard. Screaming With the Cannibals. Morgantown, WV: Vandalia Press, 2003. 261 pages. Hardcover. $25.00. Often when I come across mention of Lee Maynard's cult classic Crum, I also find a brief quotation from my introduction to the work in its 2001 edition from West Virginia University Press. This introduction has even been misquoted by reviewers who don't like the book- one writer quoted me calling Crum "foulmouthed, sexist, scatological hillbilly-stereotyping" without the rest of the sentence that said it is one of my all-time favorites. People are passionate about Crum, the gritty story of a teenager's life in a tiny town in West Virginia. Lee Maynard's new novel, Screaming With the Cannibals, picks up the story where Crum left off. Fans who couldn't get enough of Crum will leap at the opportunity to find out what happened to Jesse. And, yes, the narrator of the first book finally gets a name in Cannibals. This is part of a general distancing of the author and reader from the events of this book. Screaming With the Cannibals has several beginnings that also serve this purpose: an epigraph; a foreword; and a tall tale about the passing of a moonshiner named Uncle Long Neck whose almost immediate exit is spectacular—literally a bolt from the blue. Neither novel is strictly realistic—both are peopled with exaggerated characters and wildly raw and humorous events, but in Crum the events had the singleness and momentum of one young boy's vivid world view. In Screaming With the Cannibals, you feel that an older Jesse is looking back at the youthful Jesse, telling and retelling the events of his life. Young Jesse himself is presented as a sort of archetype of all those young adventurers who need to see what is on the other side of the next ridge. He wants to move on, to escape from everything old, especially Black Hawk Ridge in Wayne County, West Virginia, where he lived even before he went to high school in Crum. The archetypical young man with no ties he cares to acknowledge strikes off for adventure. He gets as far as Kentucky in the second part of the book, and then, in the final part, to South Carolina. Wherever Jesse goes, he finds himself in peril: it might simplybe a physical danger like getting drowsy and almost wrecking his motorcycle, or it might be 64 his ignorance of the facts of nineteen-fifties race relations in the South. Often, he is faced with a malevolent enemy who hates him for reasons that seem to be beyond the normal human scale of emotion. In Kentucky, it is the husband of an overwhelmingly lustful woman, but in South Carolina, it is a less motivated and much more dangerous figure, a racist Southern deputy sheriff who stays on Jesse's tail wherever he goes, popping unexpectedly out of the shadows. Repeatedly Jesse is made to undergo physical suffering. He is stripped naked, beaten up, thrown from the hood of a moving car, knocked around, scraped, and variously smashed, bashed, and bruised. The final section of the novel is called "South Carolina—Bleeding on the Sand." He also usually finds a woman to bind up his physical wounds, to nurture him, and often to take him to bed. There is a whole element of wish fulfillment in both the repeated survival of mortal danger and in the frequent sexual encounters. Once, for example, while Jesse is a lifeguard, he rescues a woman who is probably trying to commit suicide, but no one seems to appreciate his efforts—they take the woman to the hospital and leave the hero alone on the beach. And then—the woman he loved back in Crum, who has serendipitously turned up in the next town, comes to take him to her place to recover. This reappearance of Yvonne as well as other marvels and coincidences—like the repetition of large men who are gargantuan eaters—signal that we are not in the commonplace world where most of us labor day to day. Yet, there is a powerful psychological truth underlying Jesse's adventures...