Dale Neal’s “Appalachian Book of the Dead” Leads Readers to the Dark Side of Reality in this Southern Buddhist Thriller
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In this episode 176, we visit with award-winning writer Dale Neal, author of “Appalachian Book of the Dead,” a thriller filled with meditation, reincarnation, marriage and betrayal, death and rebirth, and how our fears give flesh to our hungry ghosts.
Best-selling author Ron Rash says “Appalachian Book of the Dead is a novel whose excellence defies easy categorization. To call it a metaphysical thriller conveys only a part of the novel’s strengths, for the novel’s characters are as complex and vividly realized as we’d expect in more character-driven fiction. Dale Neal’s novel, once begun, will be hard for any reader to put down.”
Award winning author Joan Siler says, “I was properly scared throughout this book, and properly delighted. It begins with a double murder and a disappearance, and then the Tibetan Book of the Dead guides us through a landscape of human miscalculations. It had me enthralled from page one.”
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About the Author:
Dale Neal is a novelist, teacher and veteran journalist, living in Asheville about a mile from the banks of the French Broad River. He is the author of “Appalachian Book of the Dead,” award-winning “Cow Across America” and “The Half-Life of Home.” As a reporter, he traveled everywhere from Upper Paw Paw in Madison County to Karachi in Pakistan, covering culture, books, religion, business, science and technology for the Asheville Citizen-Times. He currently teaches fiction and nonfiction at Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Asheville Center for Graduate Studies.
Dale says that living in heart of the Southern Appalachians, the world’s most ancient mountains, allows him to wander in the footsteps of the Cherokee. A seeker of sassafrass and wild romps in spring, he is prone to 50-mile circle hikes through the Nantahala Wilderness.
He’s been doing Zen meditation for the past 15 years, achieving, he says, “no enlightenment, only some willingness to entertain whatever life brings from day to day.” The dharma name given him by his teacher is Honin, meaning “Great Patience,” which he says, “comes in handy with the long haul needed to write novels.
More About Appalachian Book of the Dead
After Angel Jones escapes from a prison work crew, he leaves behind a trail of victims before disappearing in the deep woods in Yonah, N.C. Believed dead but his body never found, Angel’s presence haunts the residents of a remote mountain community.
Cal and Joy McAlister are new arrivals from Chicago. A retired commodity trader, self-sober alcoholic and heart attack survivor, Cal finds himself growing restless with his third wife. Joy, a physical therapist turned potter, wants to reshape her life and marriage. The caretaker of a girls’ summer camp next door, Doyle Smathers becomes their handyman, fetching Cal a batch of fake moonshine and building Joy a kiln. He’s also caring for a new guest, Ainsley Morse, the camp owner’s granddaughter who’s detoxing herself from a troubled past with Buddhist meditation while living alone in a yurt on the mountainside.
Angel’s energy drives these four people together and apart in unexpected ways. The novel is a metaphysical thriller, a meditation on recovery and reincarnation, marriage and betrayal, death and rebirth, an exploration of how our fears give flesh to our hungry ghosts.
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