Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 12, 1995                   TAG: 9511150092
SECTION: BOOK                    PAGE: E4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MCCRUMB'S 'BALLAD' NOVEL IS A BEST-SELLER

\ Sharyn McCrumb's third entry in her "ballad" series is easily her best novel, a deftly woven combination of Appalachian past and present. In comparison, the conventional mystery elements of the plot aren't particularly strong. The "whodunit" side of the story has been much more important in her earlier novels. Even so, "She Walks These Hills" has won several mystery awards, including the Anthony at this year's Bouchercon.

It's also just arrived on the New York Times paperback best-seller list, and that's as it should be. Whether the novel is classified as mystery, regional fiction or whatever, it's simply a good, compelling story.

At the center is Hiram "Harm" Sorley, an aging and essentially harmless prisoner who's escaped from a correctional center in the Tennessee mountains. A mental condition called Korsakoff's Syndrome has left Harm stuck in 1967 with no real knowledge of the present. Outside of an institution, he's simply an old man who's trying to find his way back to a home that no longer exists. But, years ago, he did commit murder, and so he becomes a local media hero.

At the same time, Virginia Tech professor Jeremy Cobb is retracing the trail of Katie Wyler, a young pioneer woman who was kidnapped by the Shawnee, and whose spirit gives the book its title.

Of course, the key characters from the earlier novels - Sheriff Spencer Arrowood, deputy Martha Ayers and Nora Bonesteel - play key roles, too, but the novel really isn't about them. It's more concerned with the vanishing past of Appalachia, as mainstream popular culture inexorably intrudes.

That's a theme that's always been important to Southern writers, and Sharyn McCrumb argues it well. As Nora Bonesteel notes early in the novel, "Autumn was paler now than it had been when she was a girl. To her it seemed that the whole world was diminishing, each year more stale and colorless than the one before. Even the winters were watery weariness, tepid compared to the howling blasts of wind-driven snow that she endured as a girl.

"The century was going out like a lamb. The tunes all sounded the same; apples and tomatoes tasted like cardboard; church was a committee meeting; and even good and evil themselves had degenerated into timid good intentions versus intoxicated vandalism."

That passage may overstate the novel's pessimism, but this is not a happy book. It's an effective meditation on memory and change that are coming to the mountains. Though it is of particular interest to readers in this area, its appeal is obviously much wider.