Hermit's Story

by Rick Bass

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The story “Eating” is going to hold a special, special place in my heart. Set right here outside my door in North Carolina, he gets the place and the people just right.

“I’m hungry,” Russell said. They stood there in the blue smoke, letting it bathe them for a while, and looked out at the forest dropping away below them: sweetgum, hickory, oak, loblolly, mountain laurel. They could see more ridges, more knolls and valleys, gold lit, through the framework of green leaves and branches. Tobacco country, down in the lowlands. Russell took another look at the hams. “This is my country,” he said. “Or getting real near it.”

Likewise “The Cave,” the companion story to “Eating,” is tremendous: the two young lovers underground in a coal mine. Likewise “The Fireman,” likewise “Real Town,” likewise “Swans”— the one that killed my heart. I just wish Rick Bass would write a bad story now and then.