Book Review: You, From Below

Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas

A chilling fable about the loss of home, faith, and identity in rural America

“You are climbing a mountain.” 

Like Dante finding himself in a forest at the beginning of The Divine Comedy, we are flung in-medias-res into You, From Below. 

We have an envelope in our pocket and the mission to deliver it. Mission is the name of the town, which has been swallowed by the earth, leaving only a smoldering pit in its place. Are we to blame for this Sodom? And who is we? 

Parsley, writing in the second person, is our Virgil through this Inferno, but we sense that they are also guiding themselves through things, toward understanding.

Although literally alone on this quest, the remembered voice of “Mama” appears constantly in the climber’s mind, speaking in a mostly warm register. Along the way we meet or imagine mysterious characters, each in a different way a personification of aspects of Appalachia.

Appalachia is present in this book, evoked through sparse, tangible descriptions. We are gripped by the rude vines of the kudzu tree, and, as we read about making mud pies in gran’s yard, we can feel the dirt trickle through our fingers. Metaphors about the region and its problems abound. Recall the damage done by mining in Appalachia, the leading producer of coal in the United States, when reading this passage:

“If you had made one more pie, dug a little deeper, would your caked fingernails have carved empty air? A cavern? A boiling hell pit? Could you have popped a hole in Mission and collapsed it like a lung? Would you have been the first to fall into the deep?”

Parsley’s writing is measured, yet expressive. Local idiom and biblical cadences make themselves known but do not intrude, and the dialogue between the climber and their various encounters along the way succeeds in disturbing us just enough.

While it’s obvious that Parsley has written with deliberate foresight on this topic, their work loses some of its exactness as it moves along. The moral is left to the reader, but I wonder if we could have done with a little more help.

One of our protagonists’ meetings along their way prompts them to be reminded of a question most young people struggling with faith have faced, probably from a parent with a disapproving tone: “What do you believe in?”  This novellais a testament to Em J Parsley’s valuing of the power of good writing. You, From Below is the product of a talented author.

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