West Virginia University Press has published Monsters in Appalachia, a collection of short stories by Sheryl Monks, the founding editor of Change Seven magazine and a former co-owner and editor of Press 53.

“Monsters in Appalachia is wildly outrageous at times, but there is empathy in these stories as well. Humor and sadness achieve a delicate balance,” Ron Rash, author of The Cove and Above the Waterfall, said.

Monsters in Appalachia received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews, which calls it “a memorable debut: each of these stories is as original and multidimensional as the characters who inhabit them.”

The characters within these fifteen stories are, in one way or another, staring into the abyss. While some are awaiting redemption, others are fully complicit in their own undoing.

We come upon them in the mountains of West Virginia, in the backyards of rural North Carolina, and at tourist traps along Route 66, where they smolder with hidden desires and struggle to resist the temptations that plague them.

A Melungeon woman has killed her abusive husband and drives by the home of her son’s new foster family, hoping to lure the boy back. An elderly couple witnesses the end-times and is forced to hunt monsters if they hope to survive. A young girl “tanning and manning” with her mother and aunt resists being indoctrinated by their ideas about men. A preacher’s daughter follows in the footsteps of her backsliding mother as she seduces a man who looks a lot like the devil.

A master of Appalachian dialect and colloquial speech, Monks writes prose that is dark, taut, and muscular, but also beguiling and playful. Monsters in Appalachia is a powerful work of fiction.

Sheryl Monks is the founding editor of Change Seven magazine. Previously, she was the co-owner and editor of Press 53, an independent literary publisher which she helped to establish in Winston-Salem, NC. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte. Her collection of stories, All the Girls in France, was a finalist for the 2013 Hudson Prize sponsored by Black Lawrence Press. Her fiction has been nominated for New Stories from the South and been awarded a Northwest NC Regional Artist’s Project Grant and the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award. Work has appeared in Revolution John, Black and Grey Magazine, The Greensboro Review, Writer’s Chronicle, Midwestern Gothic, Night Train, storySouth, Regarding Arts and Letters, The Toast, Backwards City Review, Southern Gothic online, Surreal South, Fried Chicken and Coffee, and elsewhere.

Many of Monks’ fellow authors had high praise for Monsters in Appalachia:

“A fresh, new voice in contemporary fiction, in stories of teenage angst, bonds of family, motherhood, and contradictions of middle age. Always surprising, these stories conjure both sorrow and mystery with intimate, loving detail.”
-Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek, Chasing the North Star, and Boone: A Biography

“Haunting, raw, terrifying, and passionate.”
-Sara Pritchard, author of Help Wanted: Female and Crackpots

“Sheryl Monks writes with unflinching honesty and deep affection about the Appalachia I know: a place of imminent peril to both body and soul, home to lingering ghosts.”
-Pinckney Benedict, author of Miracle Boy and Other Stories

“Sheryl Monks’s stories are gorgeously written dispatches from Appalachia, telling the difficult truth of what it is to survive in a place that can exact a heavy price. But these tales are generous too, and a particular grace sets on them all.”
-Charles Dodd White, author of A Shelter of Others and Sinners of Sanction County

“There’s music in these stories—visceral, rhythmical, soulful, deep. They are siren songs, taking us places we otherwise might not go.”
-Kim Church, author of Byrd

“Sheryl Monks gives us such a range and depth of character in one collection. Her stories continue to delight and haunt long after reading.”
-Ren�e K. Nicholson, author of Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center

Publication date: November 2016
192pp/PB 978-1-943665-39-6: $16.99/epub 978-1-943665-40-2:$16.99

To order this book, visit wvupress.com, phone 800.621.2736, or visit a local bookstore. To learn more about WVU Press, visit wvupress.com. For updates on books and events, follow WVU Press on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest or join our mailing list on wvupress.com.

-WVU-

11/02/16

CONTACT: Abby Freeland, sales and marketing director at West Virginia University Press,
304.293.6188, abby.freeland@mail.wvu.edu

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