Stories from the Attic

A fascinating posthumous archive of stories and excerpts from a memoir and unpublished novels arrives from the late reclusive Southern author Gay (The Long Home), who died in 2012. A slow-burning standout, “The Ascension of Pepper Yates,” follows a married small-town Tennessee sheriff whose forbidden passion for a woman eventually gets the best of him. Lustfulness also causes problems for randy Raymer in “Up to Bat with the Bases Loaded,” who finds two sisters irresistible and ends up facing the disastrous consequences of his actions. Fragments of the unpublished novel The Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train chronicle a fortune teller named Pennyroyal. The autobiographical material contained in the book often reads like thinly veiled fiction and forms an illuminating self-portrait; a piece titled “The Wreck on the Highway” encapsulates an unsavory event in his lifetime. Fans and newcomers will find plenty to enjoy in Gay’s vivid prose. This offers a fitting closure to his literary legacy. (July)