cover image One August Day

One August Day

Charlotte Morgan. Van Neste Books, $24 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-9657639-1-2

Like Marianne Wiggins (see above), Morgan has set her novel in a Virginia battered by a severe storm. On the night of August 19, 1969, the ""tail-end"" of Hurricane Camille dumped over 25 inches of rain within five hours on Nelson County. Of the more than 100 people who died in the torrential downpour, eight still remain unidentified. Building on these facts in her sturdy debut, short-story writer Morgan imagines the identities of those eight people, reconstructing the events of the final day of their lives. Helen Jansky impulsively decides she must take her children away from her emotionally abusive husband; elderly, delusional Charlotte is crotchety with her faithful ""nigra"" maid, Ora; ex-convict Clarence Winston alternates quoting the Bible with fantasies of ""baptizing"" women in a fashion the church would frown upon; Judy Marsh, burned once in love, prepares to leave town to be with the man of her dreams; and young Daniel Alexander looks for a haven from false criminal accusations and his domineering father. Interweaving her characters' stories in hour by hour segments, Morgan often furnishes background information at the expense of voice and atmosphere. Still, she builds suspense as the hurricane moves closer. Like Thornton Wilder's classic The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the narrative carries a sense of inevitability, and the reader's knowledge that a force of nature will determine the destiny of these people in its path makes the characters' lives more compelling than they otherwise might have been. (Sept.)