Where the Light Flickers

Where the Light Flickers is a meditative, spellbinding work about the complicated and often impossible moral dilemmas facing those struggling to survive in a marginalized, forgotten place.
—Dean Bakopoulos, author of Please Don't Come Back From the Moon

A book of messy lives immaculately told, Where the Light Flickers is lyric, wise, and, not least, thrilling. Ryan Burden is a masterful craftsman and this debut is the exquisite result.
—Liam Callanan, author Paris by the Book

In the fog-shrouded valleys and scarred mountaintops of Appalachian coal country, two families orbit each other in a dance that will ultimately consume them both. Hem Barry, a disgraced veterinarian whose drinking cost him his Providence practice, has dragged his family to isolated Shokten seeking redemption. Instead, he finds deeper isolation as his daughter Kate drifts toward Connor Biel, a young coal miner, and his son Trevor struggles with a devastating leg injury that may never heal.

High on the plateau above, Spoon Sullivan presides over the region's shadow economy with cold calculation. His empire of drugs, gambling, and brutal enforcement stretches across the peninsula, built on fear and loyalty money can't buy. But even kings have vulnerabilities: his wife Fay has retreated into addiction, existing more as ghost than woman, while their son Mason—bright, observant, increasingly troubled—begins seeing through the mythology of power that has sustained the Sullivan name for generations.

The collision comes through Sonny, a wounded dog who escapes Sullivan's fighting kennels and finds refuge with the Barrys. Hem's decision to treat the animal triggers a cascade of events testing every relationship and revealing the true cost of survival where law exists as suggestion and violence is common currency.

As autumn deepens into brutal winter, the novel traces intersecting paths with unflinching precision. Kate, pregnant and caught between worlds, finds herself pulled between the familiar weight of home and Connor's uncertain promise. Trevor, hobbled but still dreaming of rockets, discovers some injuries never heal while others strengthen unexpectedly. Mason begins the dangerous work of imagining a different life—one requiring him to abandon everything he's known.

The adults wage their own wars. Hem battles demons while protecting a family that may be beyond saving. Lorraine confronts that love sometimes means letting go. Spoon watches his world crumble as threats to his empire mount and his capacity for violence consumes him. Fay, in rare moments of clarity, glimpses the woman she might have been elsewhere.
Woven throughout are the animals populating this harsh landscape—fighting dogs and prize bulls, caged birds and wild deer—each mirroring the humans who claim ownership, reflecting struggles for dominance, freedom, and survival.

Ryan Burden writes with surgical precision and poetic soul, creating narrative both unflinchingly brutal and unexpectedly tender. His prose captures rural speech rhythms and generational trauma's weight while illuminating grace flickering like fireflies in gathering darkness. This literature refuses to look away from hard truths about poverty, addiction, violence, and environmental destruction, yet never loses sight of stubborn human capacity for love and transformation.

Where the Light Flickers stands as both specific portrait of overlooked people and universal examination of how we become trapped by circumstances and stories we tell ourselves. It's about violence that poverty breeds, trauma echoing across generations, and terrible beauty of marginalized lives. Most importantly, it's about courage required to break binding cycles—and recognizing that sometimes love's greatest act is knowing when to let go.

Ryan Burden is a middle school teacher, a doctor of English and Creative Writing, and a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. His short story "Coming of Age" won Redivider's 2016 Beacon Street Prize for fiction. His novel Orphans was shortlisted for the 2024 Steel Toe Books Prose Award. Other work has appeared in Switchback, Gulf Stream, and JMWW, among others. He lives in Boston, MA.