Falling Stones

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Winner of The 2001 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, selected by Ron Rozelle

Falling Stones is a compelling tale of the quest for spiritual meaning in early nineteenth-century rural America. Sylvester Marion Jones, born in 1836, inhabits a guilt-laden Protestant domain, saturated with ominous signs and wonders. His childhood is marked first by demonic visions and later by his young brother’s mysterious disappearance, for which his father blames him. Grown up, Sylvester is drawn into marriage with a young woman suspected of witchcraft. Still a seeker of light, he finally achieves the purgation of his house—at the savage cost of acknowledging the demon in himself.

About the Author

CHARLES WYATT, 2002–2003 Writer in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma (Edmund) is the author of Listening to Mozart, winner of the 1995 John Simmons Award from University of Iowa Press. He has taught creative writing at Binghamton University and Denison University, but before this incarnation he spent more than twenty-five years as an orchestral musician: principal flutist of the Nashville Symphony. For fun, he writes poetry and plays chamber music with his wife, Cindy, a harpist who really did play on Elvis’s last album.

Praise

"An extremely well-told story that is at once a love story and a ghost tale, Falling Stones is charged with beautiful language and imagery, and it is nicely paced."
—Ron Rozelle, Final Judge

"Falling Stones: The Spirit Autobiography of S.M. Jones is unlike any other book I know, a true original. I can imagine no one reading it in anything but a single sitting — the suspense is utter, the literary spell beautifully cast. It deals with dark family conflict and unseen forces and inexplicable menace, and its mysteries remain, still resonating mysteriously even after the story has concluded. This is fiction with a rare and strange poetry in it."
—Joan Silber

"With authentic power, Charles Wyatt revisits the uncanny world of an American just a step away from wilderness. In the tradition of Hawthorne, Melville, and of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, he brings to life one man's fight against inner and outer chaos."
—Judith Grossman

"In setting his concise and superbly written novel in the agrarian past of America, Charles Wyatt recreates a world in which haunted houses, witches, and ghostly presences are more than cliches associated with Halloween; indeed, his witch is a beguiling as she is believable, and casts her spell on this reader as well as on the narrator of the tale. Wyatt is a magician himself, in his ability to provide a psychological as well as psychical explanation for the mysteries found in Falling Stones. However we choose to interpret the story, though, the enchantment remains."
—James McConkey

Published by Texas Review Press

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Southern History

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