Ron Rash has made the fog-shrouded ridges of Appalachia his fictional home in novels and short stories over a highly acclaimed career dating back decades. With “The Caretaker,” his first novel in seven years, he returns to this familiar mountain terrain and its remote hill culture.
Set in the early 1950s in Blowing Rock, a hamlet in North Carolina’s mountainous west, the novel is a compelling drama of young lovers beset by parental grief and scheming. Often unforgiving elements — the sneer of class bias, community stigma and intolerance — are at work to destroy the youthful lovers.
