(Nov. 30, 2021) There’s a story about a college professor who gets snowed in at home with his wife – who was planning to leave him that same day. Then there’s the minister trekking up a mountain who picks up a hitchhiker, who ultimately pulls a knife on the preacher. Visions of death persistently visit a gravedigger, and a conservative local business owner has the revelation that his son, a well-known musician, is gay, HIV-positive and has returned home but only to die.
These stories and more are part of “A Twilight Reel: Stories,” written by East Tennessee
State University’s Dr. Michael Amos Cody, a professor and assistant chair for Graduate
Studies in the Department of Literature and Language.
All of the stories in Cody’s book, published earlier this year, happen in and around
the fictional town of Runion, North Carolina. The twelve interrelated tales, each
set in its own month over the course of the year 1999, offer a picture of a community
in an age of fast change.
Published by Pisgah Press, Cody’s work has already garnered rave reviews.
A specialist in American literature from its beginnings to the middle of the 19th
century, Cody has authored both scholarly texts and a novel, “Gabriel’s Songbook,”
in 2017.