Southern Underworld

Detail from cover

From the blues-laden blurbs to the moonlit highway of a cover, Rattlesnakes & The Moon, Darlin' Neal's debut collection, situates itself squarely within the coarse underworld its characters traverse. Most of the women have troubled or estranged families. Most of the men have been in jail. Their stories span the American South and Southwest, with characters journeying through these landscapes as relationships end, drugs soothe and threaten, and nature looms all around.

Neal aims to generate a community within the collection, as many of the stories incorporate different branches of the same families. The reader travels back and forth in time, and is asked to recall previous names and events, which gives the collection more gravitas. This creates particular interest in "Scarf" when we find out Daisy, who appears as a young girl in "A Man Wrapped in Gold," has succeeded in committing the same self-destructive act her mother attempted in the earlier tale. Other stories don't reap as much benefit from the connectivity, as the happenings are not always specifically relevant to an individual character's circumstances.

Similarly, themes and tropes move from story to story: rain signals sadness, radios provide moody soundtracks, and several characters have pivotal moments within dream sequences (one in "Sister Shadow" rendered much more uniquely than the others). Some continuity serves the collection well, as the stories rely significantly on a dark tone and a unified setting. However, repetition to such a degree indicates an occasional lack of imagination behind the curtain, for which whiskey and cigarettes are the default signifiers of a down-and-out atmosphere.

The characters make realizations (often labeled as "realizations") that usually fall short of epiphany, as the men and women must return to the turmoil in their daily lives. This is exemplified in "Lafayette," when a woman leaving her husband briefly ponders the figurative weight of her action, then immediately turns to the physical weight of the baby carrier on her neck. This movement from mental exploration to physical reality speaks to the hard-knock existence of the stories' populations, but also to the surface-level writing that seems more concerned with staying faithful to the realness of the characters than with transcending the material and moving into a more complex, human exploration.

"A Man Wrapped in Gold," the single first-person piece in the batch, is a marked exception both in content and in style. The narrator, Caroline, opens her story to the passing of time, the overcoming of hardship, and the establishment of a livable reality in a quiet style evocative of Reynolds Price. The story's episodes—domestic disputes, a father gone for work, a mother struggling to feed the children and keep her sanity—are endowed with an emotional urgency sometimes lacking in the rest of the collection. The final line, which references a tender moment between Caroline's parents, impeccably combines nostalgia, dashed dreams, and the wonderful and awful burden of familial history without resorting to stock language or melodrama.

Unfortunately, at times, the stories tend to lose momentum due to some imprecise language. Limbs are "weighted with emptiness." "Yelps" grow "silent." At other turns, the phrasing is unsurprising at best: "She looked at him without seeing." Neal intermittently achieves lyrical success, but missteps when imposing stock, overly poetic beauty onto the stereotypically unbeautiful characters and situations.

Where Neal does excel is in creating periodic moments of real dread. Light filtering through a cardboard-covered window captures the supernatural disorder of a grandmother's house. A vagabond's knock on a hotel room door shakes a woman out of her somnambulatory grief. The unnamed girl in the first story finds herself in a room full of old men, having gone inside the neighbor's house by mistake, and the threat is palpable when one man asks, "Can I be your pawpaw?" Neal's deep knowledge of her characters and the world they inhabit allows her to provide eerie bursts of specificity, though they are too few and far between...