"Screaming With The Cannibals" by Lee Maynard---Book Review

Maynard, Lee: Screaming With The Cannibals (Morgantown, WV Vandalia Press 2003)

Lee Maynard Photo by Huntington Herald-Dispatch

Until Lee Maynard's recent death on June 16, 2017, I had never read any of his work.  Maynard was, and will always be, a controversial figure in the world of literature in West Virginia and Appalachia.  His first published work, "Crum", was actually banned from sale for a time at the Tamarack Center in Beckley, WV, due to its perceived extreme negativity to Crum, WV, Maynard's hometown, and to West Virginia and Appalachia in general. Most of the West Virginia and Appalachian writers who have been my mentors and friends also held Maynard in contempt for the same reason.  We rarely, if ever, discussed him or his work.  And generally, to a person, we never bothered to read his work. Coincidentally, Maynard's death occurred just a few days before my 25th anniversary with my wife Candice and we had already planned a three day trip to West Virginia where we had been married.  I made a commitment to read some of the work of Lee Maynard based on some positive comments my friend, Cat Pleska, had made in an obituary which was published in the Huntington Herald Dispatch the week of his death.  Luckily, the first of his books which I read was "The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations In An Imagined Life", a collection of essays and selections from other books which I consider to be some of his best work.  It also lacks much of the negative discussion of West Virginia and Appalachia which is prevalent in much of his other work including "Screaming With The Cannibals" which is actually the work we are discussing in this review.  I will repeat my prior statements and say that I might well have not read any more of his work if "Crum" had been the first of his books to receive my attention.  

"Screaming With The Cannibals" is the second work in the "Crum" trilogy which has generally been conceded to be fictionalized autobiography.  As the novel opens, the protagonist, Jesse, is hitchhiking out of Crum, West Virginia, Maynard's home town on the banks of the Tug River.  I will also repeat my disclosure from earlier blog posts that I know that area quite well since I lived for about five years in Williamson and Logan in Mingo and Logan Counties and worked that entire time as a door to door salesman in nearly a dozen counties in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky on both sides of the Tug River.  Maynard's character leaves Crum to be picked up by a man driving a farm truck across the bridge on the two states' border at Williamson.  It is a bridge I crossed countless thousands of times.  Jesse is offered a job on the Kentucky farm on which his newly met friend is employed.

Lee Maynard Photo by WVU Press

Maynard's tendency to disparage West Virginia is spread equally well over Kentucky during the time the character is working there.  But somehow, I have managed to overlook Maynard's attacks on Appalachia based on the quality of much of his writing.  His work is well worth reading.  It falls short of great literature but it is genuine literature and deserves its place in the pantheon of Appalachian Literature.  The thought has suddenly occurred to me that I might have come to appreciate Lee Maynard for the same reasons that, as a mental health and substance abuse therapist, I was a fan of the Gestalt Therapy of Fritz Perls.  Both men and their works tend to raise the ire of many of their readers.  They generate reactions which are impossible to conceal.  They are cathartic.  The title of "Screaming With The Cannibals" comes from Maynard's discussion of some fundamentalist or Pentecostal  religious believers with which his character interacts in the novel.  I also must disclose that I have spent numerous hours in the company, the homes, and the churches of serpent handling believers in Appalachia and understand Pentecostalism and Holiness religion quite well.

Lee Maynard Photo by Herald Dispatch

Jesse becomes involved with the wife of a neighbor who lives near his employer.  The employer has previously given Jesse an aged and abandoned motorcycle which a former farm hand left in his barn.  As the affair becomes common knowledge, Jesse manages to get the motorcycle to run and leaves Kentucky for coastal South Carolina where he is befriended by the residents of a small African American community.  This section of the novel exposes the reader to two subjects about which Maynard often produces his best work: sex scenes and motorcycles.  The protagonist and the housewife have a highly unusual encounter on a running farm tractor and the character leaves Kentucky riding an aged and limping motorcycle.  Life in South Carolina also goes awry involving conflict with a local personification of the old fashioned, abusive, and dangerous small town police officer and Jesse heads west. The conflict with the South Carolina law man is precipitated in large part due to the local racism and Jesse's close relationships with the African Americans. In this section, Maynard takes a clear stand against racism and discrimination and is probably the most political writing in his entire body of work.

In some ways, this book will inflame the devout Appalachian loyalist.  But it will also have moments that make you glad you read it.  Take it on with an open mind, read it and the other two portions of the "Crum" trilogy in sequence, maintain an impartial attitude, and take me at my word that if you read enough of Maynard's works you will come to understand that, in spite of his periodic defamation of West Virginia and Appalachia, he did actually love the state and the region.  But it was a love, like that of many family members toward each other, which was based on a lifetime of interactions not all of which had been positive.  But Lee Maynard did, in my professional opinion, long for a family dinner on the holidays somewhere in Southern West Virginia and did, in actuality, sometimes ride his motorcycle home from the Desert Southwest to visit his home state.  He always attended the annual West Virginia Writers Conference and was well respected by those who knew him well in Appalachia.  He did think of himself as a West Virginian.  So should you!