Last Words of the Holy Ghost
Short Stories
by Matt Cashion
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Pub Date Nov 15 2015 | Archive Date Jan 04 2016
Description
Funny, heartbreaking, and real—these twelve stories showcase a dynamic range of voices belonging to characters who can’t stop confessing. They are obsessive storytellers, disturbed professors, depressed auctioneers, gambling clergy. A fourteen-year-old boy gets baptized and speaks in tongues to win the love of a girl who ushers him into adulthood; a troubled insomniac searches the woods behind his mother’s house for the “awful pretty” singing that begins each midnight; a school-system employee plans a year-end party at the site of a child’s drowning; a burned-out health-care administrator retires from New England to coastal Georgia and stumbles upon a life-changing moment inside Walmart. These big-hearted people—tethered to the places that shape them—survive their daily sorrows and absurdities with well-timed laughter; they slouch toward forgiveness, and they point their ears toward the Holy Ghost’s last words.
MATT CASHION was born in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and grew up in Brunswick and St. Simons Island, Georgia. He earned an MFA at the University of Oregon and now teaches at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse. He is the author of two novels, How the Sun Shines on Noise and Our 13th Divorce. He lives in La Crosse, Wisconsin. www.mattcashion.com
Advance Praise
"Cashion, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, joins the backwoods, Southern Gothic club that includes such eminences as Flannery O’Connor and Erskine Caldwell. The title story is simplicity itself: a teenage boy loses his senses, though not his virginity, to an underage temptress in a neighboring Georgia town and even comes to the Lord to qualify for her hand. Alas, she proves untrue. In “A Serious Question,” Charlotte Blanchard is a Yankee retiree on the Georgia coast, a neatness freak irked that life is never as neat as she wants. She goes about eliminating every threat to her routines, but she has one friend, a messy old man living as a ward of the Catholic church. When he’s remanded to a rest home, Charlotte is faced with an unsettling, messy dilemma. A lovely story in which compassion asserts itself despite all odds, but the gem of the collection is “The Girl Who Drowned at School That Time.” A student drowns on school grounds, and the district decides to drain the pond and hold a fish fry memorial. The tale is told by the school secretary, Jo, a local who hates the cretins she works with and longs to flee the town. Given the task of organizing the fish fry, she freezes, but the best of the local good old boys comes to her aid, and in gratitude, Jo sleeps with him. As church ladies and boozers stuff their faces with fish, and teenage boys kill turtles with baseball bats, Jo’s rescuer proposes, and she realizes she’s trapped forever."--Booklist
“In its precise prose and spooky intelligence and sharp-eyed examination of the condemned kind we are, Last Words of the Holy Ghost is an original. Listen: if you can find a collection of stories more cohesive, more ambitious in reach, more generous in its passion, and fancier in its footwork, I will buy it for you and deliver it in person. In the meantime, put some Matt Cashion between your ears and then try to resist the temptation to dash into the street and shout ‘hallelujah’ at your neighbors.”—Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories and judge
“Voices—rising, falling, whispering, singing—animate these vivid stories of changelessness and change, as the members of these deeply American communities negotiate the demands of social traditions and the needs of their bodies and souls. Confession—acknowledgments of failures and dreams of redemption—have rarely sounded so moving, so illuminating of our national predicaments as in Matt Cashion's bracing and splendid collection of stories.”—Tracy Daugherty, author of Hiding Man and The Last Love Song
“The way these stories—sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph—vacillate between being laugh-out-loud funny and tender and touching, calls to mind the work of George Saunders, but the voice here is all Matt Cashion's. Last Words of the Holy Ghost is populated by characters who are troubled and sometimes troubling, and oh so human in the way they persevere, however damaged or broken they may seem. Intricately designed and powerfully observed, this is a brilliant, masterful, and moving collection.”—Chad Simpson, author of Tell Everyone I Said Hi
"Only in the wild and witty world of Matt Cashion could multiple divorces, various addictions, and general Loser-dom seem both hilarious and heartbreaking. These stories are compassionate, wacky, and utterly absorbing. Cashion should be recognized for what he is: a new master of dark humor and a major new Southern talent."—Robin Hemley, author of Do-Over
“I LOVED Last Words of the Holy Ghost. Plain and simple. Loved it. Matt Cashion's stories took me in, took me home. Took me hostage. The stories are about real humans doing real (and really ridiculous) things, and you can't help but love them for it. In his characters Matt hones the edge of want so fine, so sharp, that you won't even realize you're bleeding until it's too late. Then you'll ask for more.”—Steven Sherrill, author of Joy and The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break
“I imagine Flannery O’Connor, from her perch among the Communion of Saints, perusing in happy astonishment Matt Cashion’s story collection, Last Words of the Holy Ghost. Cashion's spin on the mysteries of human behavior is nothing short of stunning, and the characters who star in these dozen wholly outrageous parables will travel with you for all your days. Their pedestrian, yet epic, falls from grace are hilarious and heartbreaking at once. Often bandied about—among readers, critics, and writers alike—is the writer’s voice. Whatever that means, you will come away from these stories knowing you’ve been evangelized by one. Cashion has reckoned the human core at its most volatile and truthful, and had the wit, courage and boundless talent to somehow cast it into words.”—Joseph Bathanti, author of The Life of the World to Come
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781574416121 |
| PRICE | $14.95 (USD) |
Average rating from 7 members
Featured Reviews
Kathleen D, Reviewer
The Girl Who Drowned at School That Time is my favorite, the teacher Jo is burned out with the confines of her small town and the rules barring her from caring as much as she does for her students. The story is heavy with poisoned hope because we know for some of the students, life is already stacked against them. Jo doesn't shed the demands forced on her, and we follow her as she yearns for more. The writing is gorgeous, and Cashion has created wonderful, believable living, breathing characters. In A Serious Question, Charlotte fights allowing Brother Michael to burrow his way into her heart. Happy with her solitude, her life free of demands other living souls make- she is struggling to let Brother Michael down. "She meant for her house to be empty of living things that made noise or produced waste or required attention of any kind." Can we ever escape the living? Doesn't life always hunt us down? These stories made me sad at times, but in other stories I was tickled by the characters. It is a lovely collection of colorful folks. I didn't expect it to be this good. Yes, read away!
Nancy A. B, Reviewer
"Listen: If you can find a collection of stories more cohesive, more ambitious in reach, more generous in its passion, and fancier in its footwork, I will buy it for you and deliver it in person." Lee K. Abbott, judge of the 2015 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction
From the first page I knew I was going to like reading the stores in The Last Words of the Holy Ghost, Matt Cashion's prize winning stories.
The press release tells it like this:
"The Last Words of the Holy Ghost, a collection of 12 Southern Gothic short stories, showcases a range of dynamic voices, characters, and settings, from the fourteen-year-old boy who speaks in tongues to the burned-out health-care administrator whose life changes during a trip to Wal-Mart."
The first story, The Girl Who Drowned At School That Time, starts with tragedy: a girl has drowned in the school pond. The school board quickly votes to fill the pond in to prevent any more drownings. It is the only responsible and sensible thing to do. Except...what to do with the fish that live in the pond? Things get complicated. It's always the small problems that cause trouble.
One man volunteers to fish them out. But they can't have one man catch and keep all the fish. They are school property after all. The fish have to be disposed of in a fair and equal way. And the fisherman already has a freezer full of catfish. The brilliant solution: have a fish fry. Plus they could raise money off the fish fry.
I was delighted by these strange folk who turn death and loss into a money making scheme! Isn't this how things work in real life, in small towns and small groups everywhere? We agree on the "big issues" and haggle over the small stuff. And--any excuse to have a party.
The responsibility to organize the event is pawned off to a secretary, a college student recently returned home. She has no intention of staying. Every day she thinks she'll quit. She sees the poverty, the ignorance, the neglected children, and the good ol' boys, and determines to leave town. Still she stays. She hasn't a clue how to pull off this fish fry. Meantime the exterminator, a veritable encyclopedia of American vermin, is pursuing her. He offers his help. At a price. The story is hilarious and dark and too true to life.
The last story, The Funeral Starts at Two, brought the book to a poignant conclusion. A man is supposed to take his father-in-law to the funeral of his brother. The father-in-law delays, enjoying his salt water pool and weaving tales about family members the son-in-law has never known. Wacky characters who would rather lift a horse, one end at a time, over a fence than go around. Who travel east to go west to be a cowboy. The son-in-law envies the older man's easy laugh. He wishes he knew more people who could laugh like that.
Parting brings a sad knowledge of how time and distance will come between them before they meet again--if ever in this life. As he drives away, the son-in-law sees "all the other ghosts who were also waving," the storied people so vividly drawn by the old man, who he can not forget.
That is the goal of a story-teller: to make people so real, in situations so real, that on closing the book these characters travel with us on our journey home.
Matt Cashion is that kind of story-teller.
To read the title story The Last Words of the Holy Ghost online click here.
I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
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