Screaming with the Cannibals - Tapa dura

Lee Maynard was born and raised in the hardscrabble ridges and hard-packed mountains of West Virginia, an upbringing that darkens and shapes much of his writing. His work has appeared in such publications such as Columbia Review of Literature, Appalachian Heritage, Kestrel, Reader's Digest, The Saturday Review, Rider Magazine, Washington Post, Country America, and The Christian Science Monitor. Maynard gained public and literary attention for his depiction of adolescent life in a rural mining town in his first novel, Crum, and received a Literary Fellowship in Fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts to complete its sequel, Screaming with the Cannibals.

An avid outdoorsman and conservationist, Maynard is a mountaineer, sea kayaker, skier, and former professional river runner. Currently, Maynard serves as President and CEO of The Storehouse, an independently funded, nonprofit food pantry in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received the 2008 Turquoise Chalice Award to honor his dedication to this organization.

Screaming with the Cannibals gets its title when the central character of Maynard’s prequel, Crum, finds himself in an evangelical service in Kentucky on the other side of the Tug River from his native West Virginia. As the folks touched by the Spirit rave and howl, he remembers that back in Crum the folks used to tell him to stay on his side of the river because the people on the other side were known to eat their children. And now, here he is in a Kentucky holy-roller church, screaming right along with the cannibals.

Since the first novel, our protagonist has visited the West Virginia holler where his family lived before they moved up to the greater sophistication of Crum. There he discovers that his favorite uncle has disappeared from the face of the earth in a moonshining accident. He then meets the girl who makes the earth—or at least the hayloft—move for him and, quite literally, he falls for her. From there he goes to Kentucky, and then to Myrtle Beach, where he gets hired as a lifeguard, although he cannot swim a stroke.