The Yesteryear Tales
by David Lee Kirkland
Published by High Hill Press
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Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart
Shades of Sherwood Anderson! Hints of William Faulkner! Praise be to the newest storyteller to publish a collection of short stories, David Lee Kirkland. In his debut collection, The Yesteryear Tales, Kirkland strikes familiar chords of two of my all-time favorite authors.
The characters that populate these interwoven stories reside in an imaginary rural setting. This setting could be the backwoods of the Tennessee hills, the Ozarks, the plains of Nebraska, or the Kirkland family turfs of Appalachia, the mountains of North Carolina and the back roads of West Virginia. The strong narrative voice lends itself to easy listening. Reading his stories are like eavesdropping on a porch full of people who know, respect, hate, and love each other. The stories sucked me in and made me want to sit down and visit “a spell.”
It’s hard to choose but my favorite story, I think, is “Three’s the Charm.” Two widowed sisters try to fix up the other with a local widower. I felt as if I was watching an old Cary Grant comedy. Comedy is hard to write, but Kirkland pulls it off with grace and aplomb. Another story that made me laugh was “Coconut Cream Pie,” in which the protagonist Harlan thinks he’s going to trick his buddy Amos into buying a pie at the school pie supper that he doesn’t want. In fact, it’s Harlan who gets fooled.
Kirkland’s voice ebbs and flows, cracking the darkening night as if a sudden thunderstorm swept through, leaving one side of the lawn peaceful, the other side in chaos. Almost all the stories have a happy ending, but the ones that don’t end like they should. The Yesteryear Tales also excels at the ability of the first sentence to make the readers want to read more. My favorite, and the perfect sentence to open a collection, was from “Homecoming”: “Sudden pounding shattered my sleep, had me reaching for a gun until my hand fell upon warm flesh and I recollected where I was.”
The Yesteryear Tales is a chock full of well-written stories that will brighten the darkest day. As for me, I’ve fallen in love with these stories. I can read them over and over and never get bored!
Armchair Interviews says: Excellent short story collection.
Author’s Web site: http://www.DavidLeeKirkland.com