Novel explores apocalypse and religion in Mississippi | DON NOBLE

For centuries, prophets of various kinds have been telling us we live in the end times. Sometimes they know the date and lead their flock to a hilltop and wait, only to walk back down again — so far.

Secular novelists also like this theme quite a lot. “On the Beach” tells us the apocalypse will be an atomic cloud circling the earth. But that was 1957.

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Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” describes an earth so sterile nothing will grow, and recently Silas House in “Lark Ascending” paints a picture of what might happen if the wildfires of the Western U.S. and Canada join together and roar east, all the way.

House is in harmony here with James Baldwin who, in, his title, quotes the Negro spiritual:

“God gave Noah the rainbow sign,

No more water, the fire next time!”

Michael Ferris Smith is an impressive Mississippi novelist with seven titles, and has already had two of his books made into films. In "Salvage This World," he sees the end of the world coming, sure enough, and, it will be water, again.

Ferris’ home territory is southwest Mississippi, the section above Louisiana.

The rains have come. It is hurricane season year around.

Agriculture is impossible; the fields are flooded.

There are few services. Hospitals, schools, stores and of course malls are closed.

Most people have left, searching for jobs and drier, higher ground.

One gas station now has a sign “NO GAS HERE: BEER AND LIQUOR ONLY.”

Now THERE is a sign of end times.

(Luckily, there are a few gas stations functioning, because these rural characters spend a lot of time ridin’ around, and do their best thinking behind the wheel on country roads.)

Just how bad things are is illustrated beautifully by Wade, who scrapes together a living salvaging scrap, the best of which comes from defunct and abandoned HVAC units.

There is no more control of heating, ventilation or air conditioning. Those days are gone.

Wade is the father of Jessie, grandfather of Jace and father-in-law of Holt, but conventional family ties are shot.

These four, long-estranged, are all in flight from Elser, a tent revival prophet attracting huge crowds, whose message is, the end is near and it is YOUR fault. She howls and the congregation fills her baskets. Part of her message is that Mississippians should reject what "they," the government, presumably, tell them. “Do you want to die where They tell you to die or do you want to live where the rain can wash away your sin?"

Elser had the keys to “The Bottom” and Wade, who worked on her tent crew for a while, stole them. Much of “Salvage This World” is the brutal, ruthless efforts of Elser’s gang of thugs to find and retrieve these keys to the (presumably heavenly) kingdom at any cost in blood and cruelty.

The Bottom is both a real place and mythological. To be found on no maps, it may have been the dying place for some Confederate soldiers or an old Civil War cemetery or a fortress or defunct insane asylum. People had opinions, although "Nobody was sure how this was known about a place none of them had ever seen."

Mississippians and Faulknerians know that the Big Bottom is the Tallahatchie River bottom, the last pristine wilderness, located in the Delta and the place of Major de Spain’s hunting camp in “The Bear.” It is, in Faulkner, a paradise lost to logging, to agriculture, to the incursions of civilization.

In this novel, The Bottom itself seems to be an inverse paradise, a hellish place reminding me of the underwater lair of Grendel’s mother. No matter, to these fanatics it is real enough.

Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.

“Salvage This World”

Author: Michael Ferris Smith

Publisher: Little Brown and, Co.

Pages: 258

Price: $28 (Hardcover)

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Novel explores apocalypse and religion in Mississippi | DON NOBLE