[REVIEW]The Pulpit vs. The Hole, by Jay Shearer

53 pages, $10.00

Review by Denton Loving

Jay Shearer is the author of the novel Five Hundred Sirens (Cairn Press, May 2014) and the short story collection How Exquisite the Dead Girl (finalist for the 2013 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction). His novella, The Pulpit vs. The Hole, was understandably selected by Percival Everett as winner of the Gold Line Press chapbook competition.

In The Pulpit vs. The Hole, Shearer gives a coming-of-age story like few others. This is a contemporary tale that takes place at an aptly-named summer camp, Camp Abednego, in Eastern Pennsylvania. Here Shearer presents the age-old questions that always arise when good and evil must confront each other. What makes Shearer’s story so powerful are the unique setting and circumstances in which the questions are asked.

The story opens just outside Camp Abednego. A boy named Jordan has led the narrator, Marty, their fellow campers from Cabin 6 (identified as troublemakers by the third day of camp), and two girls away from Abednego and into the woods. Here they blast the thick sounds of heavy metal music from a tactical position that will inevitably disrupt the camp’s nightly vespers: “AC/DC bounced off the trees, glorious and wicked and way too loud. . . Later, Jordan would argue that the song should have been ‘Highway to Hell.’ That’d be the true fit for forces of darkness.”

There are two adult figures featured in this story. Dan Musser is Cabin 6’s counselor, and Big Jim Weaver is the camp director. Musser is portrayed as not much more mature than the boys he’s counseling. But Weaver is a different story. Weaver is a much more realized character, and in turns we see him as both intensely human and powerfully God-like.

So Big Jim Weaver is God-like, and Jordan is a self-proclaimed force of darkness. The battle lines are clearly drawn, right? Of course not. This is only the beginning of Shearer’s test to his readers to understand the very fine lines of difference between good and evil.

Big Jim Weaver leads the boys from Cabin 6 in a canoe trip and “Spirit Challenge” down the Susquehanna River. “Look inward,” Weaver instructs the boys. “Look inward.” What he doesn’t tell the boys is that they should be careful about what they find when looking inward.

Shearer explores a number of themes in The Pulpit vs. The Hole. From the expected explorations of adolescent sexuality and questions of authority, there’s also the more surprising themes of war and pacifism, of death and resurrection. By nature, a chapbook novella is fueled by compression, and while readers will wish the story could go on for much longer, the compression works especially well with Shearer’s muscular language and steady, sure-footed pacing.

In the narrative’s first pages, when the boys are in the woods ready to blast their AC/DC music, Marty writes, “We meant to go back, but not unchanged.” Poor Marty will find more change than he bargained for from this short tale, and so will readers.

***

Denton Loving lives near the historic Cumberland Gap, where Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia converge. He serves as editor of drafthorse literary journal and Seeking Its Own Level, an anthology of writings about water. His work is forthcoming in River Styx and Small Print Magazine. Follow him on twitter @DentonLoving.