DALE NEAL
  • KINGS OF COWEETSEE
  • The Woman With The Stone Knife
  • Musings
  • About the writer
  • More Books
    • Appalachian Book of the Dead
    • The Half-Life of Home
    • Cow Across America
    • Behind the books
  • Contact

DALE  NEAL

 novelist, teacher, journalist, wanderer
Simply one of the most natural storytellers writing novels today.

Kevin McIlvoy, author of At the Gate of All Wonder and One Kind Favor



West of the Balsams, and good blog reviews

4/21/2013

1 Comment

 
Picture
Scenic downtown Sylva
      You need to check out Sylva, one of our more scenic small towns here in Western North Carolina, which boasts not only a Confederate statue and an old-timey courthouse on the hill, but one of the best little bookstores around - City Lights Books, where I read from "Half-Life of Home" on a Friday spring evening to an appreciative audience. Thanks Chris and Eon for making me feel at home. 
    
       Meanwhile, Pam Kelley, who writes the Reading Life column for the Charlotte Observer, observed my new novel nicely in her blog "The Reading Life." It's always strange for a journalist to have the usual roles reversed and be on the receiving end of the inquistion: So what's your novel about? What inspired you to write it? Etc.
    Pam did a yeoman's work in summarizing the book and picking out the high points of our conversation.

Here's Pam's review:


     A simple, everyday garage sale opens Dale Neal’s new novel, “The Half-Life of Home,” but it’s a garage sale fraught with meaning. 
      Eva Wilder can’t wait to rid herself of the clutter her family has accumulated over two decades. But when her husband, Royce Wilder, eyes the items for sale, he sees memories, not junk. 
     This tug between past and present, and the complicated relationship most of us have with change, lies at the heart of Neal’s story.
     It’s the second novel for Neal, 54, a reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times. His first, “Cow Across America,” won the 2009 Novello Literary Award from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg library. 
     “The Half-Life of Home” (Casperian Books; $15.95) takes place in two fictional N.C. mountain towns, Beaverdam and Altamont. (He borrowed “Altamont” from Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward Angel,” where it stands in for Asheville.)
     Neal sets his story in 1992. The Internet and digital technology haven’t yet transformed the world, but middle-aged Royce Wilder feels his once-secure life shifting beneath his feet. Raised in rural Beaverdam, he has moved to Altamont, a town that is becoming populated by transplants, strangers instead of neighbors. 
      His wife seems distant, his teenaged son, rebellious. And the family is struggling to finance a lifestyle that includes his son’s private-school education.
     Pressure to sell family land grows when he learns his hometown emits dangerously high levels of radon gas. There’s even talk that the area could become a radioactive waste dump.
     In Beaverdam, meanwhile, a rash of break-ins prompts suspicion that Wanda McRae, a troubled soul known as the Witch Woman, has been making forays into town from her mountain cabin.
     Royce discovers the Witch Woman holds a secret about his family. He also learns to move forward.
     Though more than a few Southern novels mythologize the past (such as “Gone With the Wind”), one message in this book is about letting the past go.
     Neal recalls a great-uncle who said it was a lot easier to start a car engine than hook up a horse. Sometimes, Neal says, progress can be a wonderful thing.

 Neal will read twice in Charlotte on May 12 -- at 2 p.m. at Park Road Books, 4139 Park Road, and 4 p.m. at the Wingmaker Arts Collaborative, 207 W. Worthington Ave, where he’ll be joined by fiction writer Kathryn Schwille and poet Gail Peck.
Read more here: http://www.readinglifeobs.blogspot.com/#storylink=cpy

1 Comment
dating profile photos link
1/24/2023 12:51:10 pm

The issue with shuffling Not every person is OK with it regardless. They might feel it's corrupt or unscrupulous. Or then again it might simply be plain awkward. Perhaps it appears to be terrible. Or then it somehow. You should figure out how to exploit the advantages!

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Dale Neal

    Novelist, journalist, aficionado of all things Appalachian. 

    Picture
    Picture
    Picture

    Archives

    May 2022
    October 2021
    May 2020
    March 2019
    November 2017
    April 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    August 2016
    March 2016
    January 2015
    August 2014
    July 2014
    March 2014
    September 2013
    August 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012

    Categories

    All
    Books
    Cherokee
    City Lights
    Counry Bookshop
    Darkness Visible
    Deliverance
    Faulkner
    Fred Chappell
    James Salter
    Malaprops
    McIntyre's Books
    Novel
    Pam Kelley
    Reading
    Ron Rash
    Solotaroff
    Styron
    Sylva
    The Next Big Thing
    Trails
    Walker Evans
    Wolfe
    Writing
    Writing Life

    RSS Feed

©  Dale Neal 2012. All rights reserved.
Asheville NC                                        Contact
  • KINGS OF COWEETSEE
  • The Woman With The Stone Knife
  • Musings
  • About the writer
  • More Books
    • Appalachian Book of the Dead
    • The Half-Life of Home
    • Cow Across America
    • Behind the books
  • Contact