Floodgate - by Matthew Neill Null (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A former West Virginia coal miner encounters corruption and cultural upheaval working on a dam project that will submerge his town.

In the remote corner of West Virginia in the 1960s, former coal miner Lance Drennen takes a job as an overseer for the construction of an immense flood-control dam, which will drown 2,800 acres of land that have been in his and other local families for generations. When Lance witnesses a terrible accident and discovers irregularities on the site that are guaranteed to line the pockets of the company and the local government, he must decide whether or not he will become a whistle-blower.

With incredible eloquence and clarity, Matthew Neill Null sets in motion the characters who will tug at either end of Lance's life: his wife, Johnny, the adoring daughter of a hell-raising radical coal miner, who has withdrawn into her own world, and Jim Koss, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Koss is the only person who can draw Johnny out, and he becomes Lance's confidant. But Koss has a secret history: he had been fired from the Washington agency designing the dam because of his Communist sympathies.

In a most concrete and riveting narrative, Floodgate explores the social and economic upheavals of the era--labor unrest, political and corporate corruption, persecution of Communists, the devastation of the environment--and their powerful impact on powerless communities. It is a story of loyalty to family and community, moral responsibility for personal choices, corporate greed and environmental destruction, and the depths and limits of love.

Review Quotes

"Matthew Neill Null's Floodgate is a masterpiece and a saga, a novel of torrent, flood control, and the fifty years before and beyond the mighty Summersville Dam flooded parts of five counties, erasing histories and species under thousands of acres of water. The dam's gargantuan lake saved the polluting, industrial businesses downriver and spawned a white-water rafting tourist mecca, but Floodgate tells the truth inside the sinewy lie of history: local men hired and fired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, cost overruns, deaths and injuries, the agonal guilt of ex-miners building a future that requires the death of the past, and their haunted, stalwart women who won't let go. Read Floodgate for Null's gorgeous, flint-hard, shining language, and for the lost worlds--villages and mining camps bulldozed and drowned; freshwater creeks whose native mussels (Rabbitsfoot, Pink Mucket, Pondhorn) die first; legions of giant oaks become treetop islands; perched, isolate birds watching the water; hundreds of graves torn up and moved. No wonder souls are set free to shush and sigh in the waters, I'm with you. All us, we're with you. Floodgate is unforgettable, exhilarating, terrifying."--Jayne Anne Phillips, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Night Watch

"With Floodgate, Matthew Neill Null continues his artful, now monumental, consideration of the American empire run amok and the grievous consequences for its own land, its own ideals, its own citizens. From the particular vantage of West Virginia and its working people, Null choreographs the machinery and distills the human costs of 'Power held at bay. Power at rest. Power unleashed' into a stark lamentation of injustice and a moving, lyric hymn honoring those who struggle to endure it."--Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers

"A lushly rendered, politically radical novel that illuminates not only the American past, but also our present. Floodgate is a historical novel with harrowing contemporary stakes. I loved it."--Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot

"The extraordinary work of Matthew Neill Null stands out not only for its intelligence but for the sincerity of its humanist concerns for people and the land itself. Floodgate refuses sentimentality in showing us the personal tolls in the collision of community and government, the dignity of labor and the backbreaking toll on our bodies. Here is a wise writer indeed, one who deeply understands how history can subsume and even drown out the individual story, the terrible costs we bear by not knowing how we have arrived to our present time."--Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences

Praise for Matthew Neill Null's Honey from the Lion:

"Lyrical, quietly powerful debut novel...Against a backdrop of labor unrest and the growing destruction of the old-growth forest, Null weaves a morality play of many threads: who will betray whom and at what price? The writing is exact and assured, the story complex and rewarding. Fans of John Sayles's film Matewan will find this a kindred work and just as good."--Kirkus, One of Nine Books You Shouldn't Overlook

"Award-winning short story author Null writes with an eye for the geography, players, and violent push of the Gilded Age profit engines...A debut of note for fans of historical fiction, labor, or environmental issues, and Appalachian settings; read-alike authors include Denis Johnson and E.L. Doctorow."--Library Journal, Summer Best Debuts

Praise for Null's story collection, Allegheny Front:

"Remarkable...A cleareyed look at an area that has been torn apart for more than a century...Together these stories show the human and natural calamity that follows when an entire region is seen merely as a resource...Null never yields to nihilism, but captures the rich and complex, if imperfect, lives of the dispossessed."--The New York Times

"Sometimes lyrical, sometimes scarifying stories...Within that setting of crags, foreboding forests, and onrushing creeks, Null finds poetry and moments that can sometimes bear something like grace."--STARRED review, Kirkus

"A fully immersive experience of rural Appalachia...Floodgate is utterly evocative, redolent of time and place (descriptions of the wild rhododendron thickets amaze and horrify in equal measure), and Null brilliantly captures the push-pull of pressure to maintain the status quo against the flame of structural transformation."--STARRED review, Booklist

About the Author

Matthew Neill Null is a recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mary McCarthy Prize, the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. His stories appear in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, The PEN /O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Mystery Stories. A native of West Virginia, he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His novel, Honey from the Lion (Lookout, 2015), was short listed for the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and his story collection, Allegheny Front (Sarabande, 2016), was named a finalist for Foreword's INDIE collection of the year. He teaches at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, and lives in central Pennsylvania.