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Ghost tales with Kentucky accents

Reviewed by Heather Chapman hchapman@herald-leader.com

With Halloween less than two weeks away, three new books are on the shelves to help you get in the spirit — Kentucky style.

The first is Harlan County Horrors, an anthology of fictional horror stories with a Bluegrass State flavor. The second is Tales From Kentucky Funeral Homes, a compendium of anecdotes from the state's funeral directors. Completing the collection is Ghosts of the Bluegrass, a collection of supposedly true ghost stories told by various Kentucky residents.

Harlan County Horrors, edited by Lexington resident Mari Adkins, is a fun, spooky ride through southeastern Kentucky, with 12 stories from up-and-coming horror and sci-fi writers. As in most anthologies, there were are a few weak stories, but most were excellently told and free of clichés.

After years of movies and novels whose horror stories in Appalachia involve stupid urban people who get waylaid by mutant hicks, it was refreshing to read stories that respect the local culture and its people.

Besides, in this book, only one urban idiot gets killed, but he should have known better than to mess with that roadkill. Read Ronald Kelly's The Thing at the Side of the Road — a flat-out freak-out horror story if ever there was one — and you'll see what I mean.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the anthology is the rich vein of commentary about coal that runs throughout the stories. In Earl P. Dean's Hiding Mountain: Our Future in Apples, locals work for aliens harvesting strange stuff from a toxic soup. It's dangerous, but they do it because they need the money.

In Geoffrey Girard's excellent Psychomachia, coal miners go mad after encountering an ancient evil deep in a coal mine. It is utterly terrifying, and the imagery is so vivid that I felt as if I was there. I reread it twice just for the luxury of the language.

Robby Sparks' Spirit Fire is another great coal-related story, about a downtrodden miner who finds a magic lamp and sics the genie on his enemies. The language in this one is lovely, too: When the main character stands up and his knees pop, it sounds like the seal breaking on a new bottle of Jim Beam. However, the relentless phonetically rendered dialogue gets tedious at times.

Of course, coal isn't the only focus of the anthology; the stories also deal with a wide range of other issues, including the fury of a woman scorned, and xenophobia — here rendered literal with an alien who works at the University of Kentucky as an anthropologist and visits Harlan.

Overall, Harlan County Horrors is a good read, made even more chilling by authentic local detail. As I read T.L. Trevaskis's Harlan Moon, set mostly in Resthaven Cemetary, I could picture the characters hunting a vampire next to my Uncle Byrd's grave. It was disconcerting to say the least.

The second book of the trio, Tales From Kentucky Funeral Homes, also is a fascinating read. The editor, William Lynwood Montell, collected dozens, if not hundreds, of anecdotes from Kentucky funeral directors that give a real behind-the-scenes look at the profession.

Some of the stories are thoughtful explanations of past funeral customs and ruminations on the needs of the grieving, but many are also funny. Understandably, a funeral director has to develop a sense of humor to function.

I particularly enjoyed a story about a widow who brought her jealous boyfriend to her husband's funeral, and one about a feisty old lady who shopped for her own burial clothes and gave them to the funeral director because she didn't expect her no-account grandson to carry out her last wishes when she died. Priceless.

Like Tales From Kentucky Funeral Homes, the final book of the three, Ghosts of the Bluegrass is a treasure trove of stories from Kentuckians.

It began as a class project at Georgetown College; to help students practice interviewing and transcribing, professors James McCormick and Macy Wyatt asked them to interview people about ghost stories they had heard or that had happened to them.

Some of the anecdotes are patent retellings of classic urban legends such as the disappearing hitchhiker, but many are decidedly original.

What makes this book so disturbing is the lack of window dressing on the anecdotes. It's just regular people, not professional storytellers, who spoke into a tape recorder about the weird things they had seen. That kind of realistic presentation, a la Blair Witch Project, makes their words even more believable.

Overall, this an enjoyable trio of books to read, made even more so because they're homegrown.