Reading the South
New Fiction by Regional Authors, September 2003
by Hal Jacobs
for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Suzanne Kingsbury's The Gospel According to Gracey (Scribner, August 2003, $22) profiles a day in the life of Atlanta's inner city drug culture from the vantage point of some of its most desperate users and dealers. Gracey Fill bridges both worlds as junkie and ex-wife to the Rocket, a shadowy figure who is spreading some killer heroin on the streets.

Confined in a west Atlanta precinct room, Gracey will only divulge his whereabouts on one condition: The two narcotics detectives -- a fresh rookie and jaded vet -- must listen to her personal history so they'll understand her as a human being instead of writing her off as another washed-up junkie.

Outside the questioning room, the streets churn. A young Buckhead blueblood, Frazier Sky, lives in a rundown Cabbagetown house to be closer to his real love, heroin. His girlfriend, Audrey, who should be preparing for that night's Lovett School prom, tags along as he trades in a box of used needles for new works. Their parents are too needy to notice: Frazier's father and Audrey's mother are preoccupied with their own extramarital fling.

The most dashing, authentic character in the novel is Deneeka, a drug runner for the Rocket and a homeless transvestite who winds up on a collision course with the young Buckhead couple. When she brings drugs to a group of college kids huddled in a derelict house, "she is a queen, twirling around, bringing cake for her subjects."

At times, though, the novel itself seems to twirl around. While offering a graphic, disturbing close-up of Atlanta's drug culture, the writing frequently hits notes that sound trumped-up ("savage beasts have stampeded in fellowship through the wild plains of her body") or inaccurate (throughout the novel, "Cabbagetown" is spelled "Cabbage Town") as it winds towards a heavy, moralistic ending.

Kingsbury is also the author of "The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me."

***

Is it worse to lose your sister or your husband? That's the question that Maryanne Stahl poses in The Opposite Shore (NAL Accent paperback, August 2003, $12.95) after a 40-something woman discovers her husband and sister locked in a kiss on her husband's sailboat. Rather than confront William and Anna, Rose moves to a nearby island community with her teenage daughter and rebuilds her life around her emerging painting career.

In alternating chapters, Stahl, a native New Yorker who lives near Atlanta, shows the weight of days and weeks pressing on her characters as a result of their choices. William, an English professor in New Haven, must decide if he should leave everyone behind and accept a one-year post as visiting professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Anna contemplates quitting her job at a nature center to crew on schooners sailing across the Atlantic.

Slowly a sense of balance returns. And just as a stormy kiss shattered their relationships in the first place, a stormy sea brings everyone back together in an arrangement that no one could have foreseen.

Stahl is also the author of Forgive the Moon.

***

Erica Orloff's Diary of a Blues Goddess (Red Dress Ink, August 2003, $12.95) reads like an episode of "Sex and the City" transposed to muggy, jazzy New Orleans. Instead of being a sex columnist, Georgia Ray Miller is a wedding singer who lacks the confidence to be a blues diva. But as she embarks on relationship with her own Mr. Big, a N'awlins blueblood, she finds herself singing the blues like never before.

Of course, Georgia shares all the intimate little details with her best friend, a glamorous drag queen from the Quarter. And as she evolves into a "blues goddess," she receives beaucoup support from her devoted bandmates (especially a certain soulful Irish bluesman), and her artsy grandmother, who owns the former brothel that puts a roof--and ghosts--over their heads.

Orloff, a transplanted New Yorker living in South Florida, is also the author of Spanish Disco.

An edited version of these reviews appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, Sept. 7, 2003.

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