"Ancestors and Others": A treasure chest of Fred Chappell's gemlike stories

"Ancestors and Others"

by Fred Chappell

St. Martin's Press, 320 pp., $27.99

Barn animals that can speak only on Christmas Eve riff, wisely and comically, on humans and their stories. Composer Franz Joseph Haydn has an otherworldly experience while looking through the telescope of his contemporary, astronomer William Herschel. A blind woman and her young companion visit old graves to recover vintage roses.

These are a few of the sometimes homespun, sometimes surreal short stories in North Carolina author and poet Fred Chappell's new collection, "Ancestors and Others." Of the many books I read in 2009, it was by far the best, a treasure chest of gemlike stories, masterfully written and brilliantly unpredictable.

Chappell's strange, beautiful fables cross a number of genres, including historical fiction, science fiction, Southern Gothic and primitive Appalachian storytelling. Even his gravest tales contain humor.

My favorite was "Alma," narrated by a lonesome mountain man in a post-apocalyptic future whose wilderness haven is invaded by a motley slaver whipping along a chain gang of dirty, starved women. Although the protagonist does not have the words to say why, he is profoundly unnerved by the brutality and by the women, especially one who calls herself Alma. ("I was thunderstruck," he says. "I didn't have the least idea that women could even talk, much less have names.")

One minute, Chappell channels the sensibilities and limited grammar of a rural resident of his native North Carolina. In the next, he embraces the baroque tone of 17th-century high society. You think of Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Connor and many others while reading him.