Four years after the publication of Serena, Ron Rash returns to the mountains of western North Carolina to tell a love story set in the waning days of the First World War.
Life is simple and harsh in the cove where Laurel Shelton lives with her brother, Hank, who's returned home after sacrificing a hand on the European battlefield. Their parents both have died in the preceding year and Laura, disfigured by a prominent birthmark, must endure the whispers of locals that she is a witch.
Her life changes the day she encounters Walter Smith, a mute, illiterate man who plays flute music so sorrowful it was as if "was about every loss that had ever been." When he proves his usefulness as a laborer, the Sheltons invite him to stay on at their cabin; the initial attraction Laura feels for him quickly deepens into love. The discovery midway through the novel of a secret Walter has been hiding casts a dangerous new light on the lovers' involvement and propels the story toward its devastating climax.
The novel is based in part on a true incident involving German sailors interned in a prison camp in Hot Springs, N.C. In the character of Chauncey Feith, an officious striver who serves as the local army recruiter and scourge of all things German, Rash exposes the ugliness of the nativist sentiment that seems a recurring plague of our life in wartime.
That strong sense of place might cause some to pigeonhole Ron Rash as a "regional" writer, but with The Cove, he leaves the strong impression he's only begun to mine a rich lode of memory and imagination his region has delivered to him. --Harvey Freedenberg