White trash, red velvet

Set in North Carolina and echoing a rich tradition of Appalachian storytelling, Donald Secreast's second book of fiction explores with deeply felt sympathy and acute insight the delicate web of family relations, the natural cycles of growth and loss within one very appealing smalltown American family. The twelve interrelated stories in this collection illuminate the inner lives of Curtis and Adele Holsclaw and their three children while offering a vivid portrait of the small factory town in rural North Carolina where they live. Evoking pivotal scenes in the life of this bluecollar family, Secreast sketches the often disappointing and sometimes tragic paths his characters' lives follow through several decades. The most troubled of the Holsclaws is probably the eldest daughter, Marleen, whose love of fast cars and vain men becomes a dynamic emotional force in the family - provoking her parents perpetual concern, irritation from her sassy little sister, Phyllis, and quiet shock from her shy younger brother. During her final year in high school, Marleen dates the senior upholsterer at the furniture factory, Gaither Drum, whose red '57 Chevrolet Bel Air has roll-pleated Russian leather seats that make Marleen dream of stripping bare and driving all the way up to the Virginia line. In the title story, Gaither's desire to win Marleen's affection by protecting her from the threatening bully Junior McLaughlin drives him to a bizarre upholstering showdown in which he stakes the seats Marleen adores for the chance to humiliate the blustering redneck. In White Trash, Red Velvet, Donald Secreast again creates fiction that is distinguished as much by its one-of-a-kind characters and offbeat humor as by what John Barth has heralded as the author's "gift for extraordinary metaphor." With unsentimental tenderness, Secreast presents a range of voices from the Appalachian foothills, inflecting them with the telling gestures and rich sense of lived history that only a sharp-eyed native of the region could render so intimately.