Trailhead: & Other Stories

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Laura Zanky

The Carolina Mountains have always been fertile ground for strange and unsettling fiction, and Leslie McCall understands exactly why. In Trailhead & Other Stories, he works the seam between the familiar and the disturbing with the assurance of a writer who knows that the most disquieting things are never entirely foreign. They live close to home, in landscape you recognize, among people you think you understand, until suddenly you do not.

The collection belongs to the Southern Gothic tradition, but McCall wears that inheritance lightly. His stories are less interested in grotesquerie for its own sake than in the way memory, solitude, and the deep strangeness of rural life can quietly erode the boundary between what is real and what the mind has made. Flashbacks shade into hallucinations. Folklore bleeds into the present. A familiar path becomes something else entirely by the time a character reaches its end. McCall creates these effects without heavy machinery, which is the harder and more impressive way to do it.

Solitude is the collection’s recurring weather. His characters are often alone in the physical sense but even more alone in the interior sense, people carrying histories and losses and half-remembered stories that shape everything they see without their quite knowing it. McCall is a careful observer of the way rural landscapes hold meaning for the people who grow up inside them, and the way those same landscapes can feel suddenly alien at the wrong moment, or in the wrong light, or when grief or dread has subtly retuned the senses.

The result is a collection that rewards readers willing to stay with its ambiguities rather than reach for resolution. McCall does not always explain what happened, which is entirely the right choice. What lingers in Southern Gothic at its best is not the answer but the unease, and Trailhead & Other Stories delivers that with real craft and psychological precision.