“The Stone Catchers” Foregrounds America’s Unique Gun Problem https://ift.tt/17aYLkW
In her novel The Stone Catchers, author Laura Leigh Morris tackles one of the most difficult challenges America faces — gun violence. In the pages of her novel, four Brickton Community College members endure personal loss, inexplicable grief, and deep psychological ramifications after an active shooter enters campus, opens fire, and embarks on a gruesome killing spree. Deepening the psychological and emotional wounds each person carries is the fact that the killer was someone each of them knew and interacted with. Thus, each of the four wrestles to process the event’s horror and the unexpected, yet fleeting, media fame the shooting delivers.
The novel’s structure, which alternates between voices, shows survivors’ grappling with the shooting as well as with the instability that emerges for them individually during the aftermath. The structure then mirrors the emotional rollercoasters on which the characters embark as they navigate their communities and family lives.
In the character Priscilla Silver readers see the great lengths to which some survivors and their families go in order to manipulate and exploit a situation to gain fame. Coerced by her mother, Priscilla, a struggling single mother, attempts to maneuver the spotlight and the heroic story onto herself. Priscilla’s mother believes the instant media fame might help her daughter find a suitable partner to help Priscilla financially and with her baby. The scenes in which Priscilla capitulates to her mother’s demands are heartbreaking, because readers witness a young woman — who knows her mother’s actions are wrong but has few options — pressured to lie.
Other characters, such as Charlie Folger, embody rural, economically depressed Appalachia. Left by his mother to survive on his own and living in the trailer his mother abandoned, Charlie ekes out a meager existence working at House of Tires and running 12 miles per day to and from the community college where he studies. As readers navigate Charlie’s post-shooting existence, they learn that, at one point during their childhoods, he and the shooter were friends. This revelation adds a complexity to Charlie’s character, who stands as a representation of the stalwart independence permeating rural Appalachia but also as the shooter’s foil. As readers learn about Charlie’s interactions with the shooter, they understand that the shooter’s violent tendencies were evident but overlooked.
The book also addresses the issue of gun ownership — a key voting issue for many in Appalachia and in the American South. More than half of the state populations of West Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi, for instance, own a firearm. In fact, the highest rates of gun ownership are in the South. Inherent to The Stone Catchers’ conversation is the astonishing, and often bewildering, access Americans have to firearms. Primarily, this conversation develops as the investigation of the shooter’s bedroom within his mother’s home unfolds. Readers see a young man obsessed with violent video games, the hypersexualization of women, an exacerbated sense of isolation and loneliness, and, ultimately, the weapons his mother knew he owned. The shooter’s background story mirrors any number of investigative news reports detailing a mass shooter’s profile, and this sense of realness deepens the novel’s unsettling tone about America’s gun violence epidemic.
Of course, the fictional Appalachian community portrayed in The Stone Catchers merely serves as a microcosm of modern America. In characters like Miller James, the undeniability of Appalachia’s — and America’s — celebration of toxic masculinity is undeniable. Miller’s presence in the novel is one of volatility. He is a man ready to fight — and he frequently does. One of his hallmark moments is when, after leaving his young daughter to sleep in his pick-up truck, Miller fights two drunk teenagers in order to protect his daughter. He also encourages his young daughter to lie to her mother (his ex-wife) about what happened. In this portrayal, Miller becomes almost a stereotype of a Southern/Appalachian man, one that contrasts with more emotional and sensitive characters like Charlie Folger. More significantly, Miller’s character stands as a critical reassessment point for both Appalachia and Appalachian masculinity. As Leah Hampton’s article in Guernica emphasizes, the assumptions about Appalachia — and ultimately about Appalachian men — “have been socially constructed” and live deep in the “national psyche.” Thus, The Stone Catchers becomes an analytical text carrying significant sociocultural examinations relevant to today’s Appalachia.
Readers should be forewarned that The Stone Catchers is an emotionally heavy read from its first page until its last. Because of this, the novel’s structure actually benefits the overall reading experience. The individual narratives are, for the most part, brief. Morris’s detailed writing, in which each word matters and carries narrative significance, works with this structural compression to create the various individual and communal tumults. This compression culminates at the novel’s end, and the affected group grows closer because of their shared traumatic experience — as well as their desire to move forward in their lives.
But it could easily be called America’s novel, too. Its rural Appalachian setting and its message about gun ownership and gun violence — and America’s fascination with violence overall — are immediate and necessary. Most of all, it asks each and every American to reassess America’s relationship with guns and the Second Amendment. It is the novel that, after each and every mass shooting in America, Americans should be required to read. The Stone Catchers is timeless and necessary.
The Stone Catchers
By Laura Leigh Morris
University of Kentucky Press
Published August 20, 2024 (Paperback)
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