Shortlisted for the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize
In this lyrical and suspenseful debut novel, a turn-of-the-century
logging company decimates ten thousand acres of virgin forest in the
West Virginia Alleghenies--and transforms a brotherhood of timber wolves
into revolutionaries.
After fleeing his childhood farm in the wake of scandal, Cur Greathouse
arrives at the Cheat River Paper & Pulp Company's Blackpine camp, where
an unlikely family of sawyers offers him new hope. But the work there is
exacting and dangerous--with men's worth measured in ledger columns.
Whispers of a union strike pass from bunk to bunk. Against the rasp of
the misery whip and the crash of felled hemlock and red spruce, Cur
encounters a cast of characters who will challenge his loyalties: a
minister grasping after his dwindling congregation, a Syrian peddler who
longs to put down his pack and open a store, a slighted Slovenian wife
turned activist, and a trio of reckless land barons. Cur must accept or
betray the call to lead a rebellion--and finally reconcile a forbidden
love.
Manuel Muñoz says of reading Matthew Neill Null's image-rich prose, "The
real pleasure--and certainly not the only one--is in the sentences, as
complex, deliberately assured, and lethal as Flannery O'Connor's." A
startling elegy that establishes its author as a tremendous new literary
voice, Honey from the Lion evokes the ecological devastation and human
tragedy behind the Gilded Age, and sings both the land and ordinary
lives in all their extraordinary resilience.
