"I come from a race of stortytellers," writes Sharyn McCrumb in her introduction to the first complete collection of her wonderfully rich and mordant short stories. "My father's family--the Arrowoods and the McCourys--settled in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina when the wilderness was still Indian country." Like McCrumb's fine novels (She Walks These Hills and a dozen others), these 24 stories link the mysteries of the past with life in present-day Appalachia, using chains of words stronger than any steel.


From Library Journal
This is the first story collection from best-selling mystery writer McCrumb (e.g., She Walks These Hills and If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him, both LJ 5/1/95). With settings, tone, diction, and characters varying so widely, the 25 stories might have been written by 15 different writers. The one theme common to many of the stories is the desire for?and usually accomplishment of?revenge. Some stories, especially the first one, "Precious Jewel," are very fine, subtle, and moving. In others, however, a distancing irony prevents the reader's involvement with the characters. Some nicely convey a feeling for the rural South ("The Witness") and others the often-fraught relationship between men and women that is not limited to any region ("A Snare As Old as Solomon," "John Knox in Paradise"). The length of the stories does not allow much plot, and McCrumb sometimes attempts to compensate by winding up with an obvious metaphor or startling action to provide a punch. Buy where there is demand for her novels, which are clearly McCrumb's strong suit.?Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll., Bronxville, N.Y.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Jack Sullivan
...McCrumb provides a rare glimpse of a remote world. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she does not sentimentalize the South.... a collection in which the best pieces ... have an austere brilliance.


From AudioFile
Sharon Gless rises to the challenge as narrator of this collection of short fiction, which features startlingly diverse settings and characters. She voices the strength of the mountain people in the stories set in Appalachia and catches the spirit of adolescent angst in two stories of young love. She also captures the desperation of a paroled murderer who wants only to live a quiet life who is pursued by a heedless reporter, and is hilarious in a story of how a group of nursing home residents come to own their own mummy. This collection is delightfully surprising, offering something different in every story and showcasing Gless's versatility. M.A.M. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
Not many mystery writers use story collections as crossover books, but McCrumb's versatility in novels as different as Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992) and The Rosewood Casket (1996) makes the transition here seem inevitable. Though most of the 24 tales take some form easily recognizable to McCrumb's large following--the elegiac southern memoir, the astringently ironic anecdote, the updated folktale--the forms themselves are whimsically diverse. The common thread certainly isn't mystery: There's only one orthodox whodunit (``Happiness Is a Dead Poet,'' a delicious tale of literary politics) and one coming-of-age story featuring McCrumb's regular sleuth, Elizabeth MacPherson- -but a sad sense of past oppression and injustice that, in the most characteristic stories (``The Luncheon,'' ``Gentle Reader,'' ``Not All Brides Are Beautiful''), curdles to civilized rage. No particular standouts--McCrumb really needs the novel length to shine--but a revealing sketchbook of two dozen tales exploring the quicksilver border between mystery and magic. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Foggy Mountain Breakdown, the first-ever collection of Sharyn McCrumb's short fiction, is a literary quilting of old and new, humorous and heartfelt, offering award-winning works - and two stories never before published - contrasting mountain childhoods past and present. Chilling tales of suspense alternate with evocative character portraits and compelling narratives that embrace the southern Appalachian locales and themes of McCrumb's acclaimed Ballad Novels. Within this cornucopia of two dozen stories, Old Rattler, a mountain healer, skirmishes with a serial killer...Princess Di investigates long-kept secrets within the House of Windsor...a reincarnated murder victim seeks delicious revenge...and while honeymooning in the bridegroom's ancestral hilltop homeplace, two newlyweds harbor second thoughts.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

"I grew up seeing the world as an exciting place," writes popular mystery writer McCrumb (If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him) in the introduction to her first short story collection. "The quiet tales of suburban angst so popular in modern fiction are Martian to me." It shows in these 25 tales, most set either in the Appalachia familiar to her fans or in her mother's "flatland South"; the title story is a portrait of her father's spartan childhood in rural Tennessee. "Love on First Bounce,'' written when McCrumb was in high school, introduces feisty Elizabeth MacPherson, heroine of eight later novels. Elizabeth is reading Dorothy Parker when we meet her; so, evidently, was McCrumb, who learns from Parker how to prod her stories along with pointed, dismissive phrases (of a boy-crazy friend: "She likes to build souls for mysterious strangers; I suppose getting to know someone would spoil the effect"). Fourteen novels haven't dulled McCrumb's wit. A few of these stories are bloodcurdling character studies; others are pervaded with loneliness and despair, and some draw on the legends of her Scottish ancestors. Ordinary housewives, a potential serial killer and isolated, poor mountain folk caught between or straddling cultures are grist for her imagination. Perhaps the best entries in the collectionamong them "Gentle Reader," which chronicles the short but profitable epistolary friendship between a popular Southern mystery writer and a mysterious fanadopt the politely satirical tone of her mysteries and are sure to please her readers (gentle and otherwise). (Sept.)

Library Journal

This is the first story collection from best-selling mystery writer McCrumb (e.g., She Walks These Hills and If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him, both LJ 5/1/95). With settings, tone, diction, and characters varying so widely, the 25 stories might have been written by 15 different writers. The one theme common to many of the stories is the desire forand usually accomplishment ofrevenge. Some stories, especially the first one, "Precious Jewel," are very fine, subtle, and moving. In others, however, a distancing irony prevents the reader's involvement with the characters. Some nicely convey a feeling for the rural South ("The Witness") and others the often-fraught relationship between men and women that is not limited to any region ("A Snare As Old as Solomon," "John Knox in Paradise"). The length of the stories does not allow much plot, and McCrumb sometimes attempts to compensate by winding up with an obvious metaphor or startling action to provide a punch. Buy where there is demand for her novels, which are clearly McCrumb's strong suit.Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll., Bronxville, N.Y.

Kirkus Reviews

Not many mystery writers use story collections as crossover books, but McCrumb's versatility in novels as different as Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992) and The Rosewood Casket (1996) makes the transition here seem inevitable. Though most of the 24 tales take some form easily recognizable to McCrumb's large following—the elegiac southern memoir, the astringently ironic anecdote, the updated folktale—the forms themselves are whimsically diverse. The common thread certainly isn't mystery: There's only one orthodox whodunit ("Happiness Is a Dead Poet," a delicious tale of literary politics) and one coming-of-age story featuring McCrumb's regular sleuth, Elizabeth MacPherson—but a sad sense of past oppression and injustice that, in the most characteristic stories ("The Luncheon," "Gentle Reader," "Not All Brides Are Beautiful"), curdles to civilized rage.

No particular standouts—McCrumb really needs the novel length to shine—but a revealing sketchbook of two dozen tales exploring the quicksilver border between mystery and magic.

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