On a Saturday night three teenagers break into an abandoned neon factory and are fascinated by a vat of mercury glistening in the half-light. They play with the strange, silvery substance, coating their arms and cigarettes with it. For Katelynn, the poisoning is swift and debilitating. For one of her companions, it is a death sentence. While slowly recovering from mercury poisoning, Katelynn witnesses the sinking of a local tour boat outside her family’s lakeside home. Louisa, the boat’s captain and one of only two survivors, is devastated by the enormity of the tragedy and seeks out Katelynn, hoping the young witness can help her better understand what happened. As Louisa and Katelynn grow close, the two begin a journey that will ultimately take them both to the edge of loss and within reach of redemption. Cary Holladay’s Mercury relates haunting stories of unforgettable people with self-assurance and literary skill rare for a debut novel. This richly textured and moving book will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.

Mercury: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Holladay, Cary

United States

Shaye Areheart Books

The Quick-Change Artist: Stories

Finalist for the 2007 John Gardner Award for Fiction
In these stories of magic and memory, clustered around a resort hotel in a small Virginia community, Cary Holladay takes the reader on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the community and its visitors. From the quiet of a rural forest to the rhythms of rock and roll, The Quick-Change Artist is at once whimsical and hard-edged, dizzying in its matter-of-fact delivery of the fantastic. Romance, a sense of place and belonging, and the supernatural—especially in the lives of children coming of age—offer windows into worlds beyond the ordinary throughout The Quick-Change Artist. In the title story, a young chambermaid is in love with a foreign magician who performs at the hotel where she works. In “Heaven,” set during the 1918 flu epidemic, a struggling mother and son rely on the support of their fortune-telling plow horse. The narrator of “Jane's Hat” recalls a childhood enlivened by an unusual school principal and a friend who starts finding beauty everywhere. Horses and the people who love them, wanderers and those who feed them, creatures that disappear and those who search for them: these are stories with a constant heart.

Contemporary

SWALLOW PRESS+

Finalist for the 2007 John Gardner Award for FictionIn these stories of magic and memory, clustered around a resort hotel in a small Virginia community, Cary Holladay takes the reader on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the community and its visitors. From the quiet of a rural forest to the rhythms of rock and roll, The Quick-Change Artist is at once whimsical and hard-edged, dizzying in its matter-of-fact delivery of the fantastic.Romance, a sense of place and belonging, and the supernatural—especially in the lives of children coming of age—offer windows into worlds beyond the ordinary throughout The Quick-Change Artist. In the title story, a young chambermaid is in love with a foreign magician who performs at the hotel where she works. In “Heaven,” set during the 1918 flu epidemic, a struggling mother and son rely on the support of their fortune-telling plow horse. The narrator of “Jane's Hat” recalls a childhood enlivened by an unusual school principal and a friend who starts finding beauty everywhere.Horses and the people who love them, wanderers and those who feed them, creatures that disappear and those who search for them: these are stories with a constant heart.

Brides in the Sky: Stories and a Novella

Literary

Each of the crystalline worlds Cary Holladay brings us in the short stories and novella that make up Brides in the Sky has sisterhood, in all its urgency and peril, at its heart. In the title story, two women in 1850s Virginia marry brothers who promptly uproot them to follow the Oregon Trail west, until an unexpected shift of allegiance separates the sisters forever. Elsewhere in the book, a young boy’s kidnapping ignites tensions in a sorority house; frontier figure Cynthia Ann Parker struggles upon her return to her birth community from the Comanche people with whom she’s lived a full life; and in a metafictional twist, a gothic tale resonates in the present. In the novella, “A Thousand Stings,” three sisters come of age in the 1960s over a long summer of small-town scandal and universal stakes. These are just some of the lives, shaped by migrations, yearning, and the long shadows of myth, that Holladay creates. She crafts them with subtle humor, a stunning sense of place, and an unerring eye for character.

Set in the pastoral horse country of Rapidian, Virginia, the stories in Cary Holladay's Horse People chronicle the lives of the Fenton family through the Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II. At the center of these interconnected stories is Nelle, a northern debutante who marries into the Fenton family and establishes herself as their stern and combative matriarch. Nelle's arrival in Virginia sets up the familial conflict: The Fentons, though well-respected millers and horse-breeders, remain yeoman farmers, whereas Nelle grew up in a wealthy, sophisticated urban environment. Her high-brow sensibility creates animosity within her new family and fosters resentment among the rural poor. Headstrong and contentious, Nelle relies on an almost supernatural connection with horses to escape the hostility that surrounds her. As Nelle ages and experiences the sweeping cultural changes and hardships of early twentieth-century America, she comes to symbolize everything she once challenged in this community. Through these multi-generational stories, Holladay draws on the folklore and history of her native Virginia and examines the cultural, racial, gender, and economic tensions that pervaded the entire nation. As a result, Horse People considers a particular place and the life of an exceptional woman as indicative of the struggles of all.

Horse People: Stories (Yellow Shoe Fiction)

LSU Press

The Deer in the Mirror (Ohio State Univ Prize in Short Fiction)

With a song-like voice and deep knowledge of the history and folklore of her native Virginia, Cary Holladay creates dazzling stories of hardship and ecstasy. A young widow romances a German immigrant while weighing a proposal from the colonial governor. Convicted of murdering her master, an enslaved woman is burned at the stake. A breakneck stagecoach ride gives a bricklayer’s apprentice the power to save or destroy his fellow passengers. An aging bachelor despairs of his marriage to a Confederate orphan. A beautiful adventuress joins the 1898 Alaska Gold Rush, charms a violent gangster, and figures out the secret of his fabulous wealth. This seventh book from an award-winning author spans 300 years in the Old Dominion. Holladay’s people fight the wars, battle the floods, and wrest a living from a wilderness where “Time is God’s, not ours”—so says a reformed prostitute whose obsessive love for an amnesiac Yankee soldier defines her life. With a sensuous, lyrical style, Holladay holds a distinctive place in contemporary fiction. All of these stories have appeared in major literary journals and anthologies, including Tin House and New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best.

Ohio State University Press

Images of dancing and the theme of survival connect the stories in Cary Holladay's latest fiction collection, The Palace of Wasted Footsteps. These images may be explicit, or understated, as in "Mayflies," which suggests the glorious yet frantic dance of brief, intense lives. Yet each story depicts men, women, and children partnered with death, love, or strange, wonderful chance.
Set largely in the Mid-South, Holladay's stories feature characters with honest, even old-fashioned, sensibilities who set out to do right and end up smitten. The policeman in "Doll" discovers that his affection is torn between his pregnant wife, a mannequin he found in a dump, and a haughty saleswoman whose smile is like "a cat's yawn." The young woman in "Runaways," bedazzled by the vanished hot-air balloonist who was her best friend's father, creates a loving legend about him that inspires and sustains her.
Darker in subject matter and atmosphere, "Merry-Go-Sorry" captures an ironic theme that is carried throughout the collection. "Merry- go-sorry. It means a story with good news and bad . . . smacking you in the face at the same time." Centering on a small Arkansas town in the aftermath of a triple murder, the story follows the effects of three boys' deaths on the lives of their parents, friends, and accused killers. Despite the sorrow felt throughout the community, one girl finds solace in her new baby and in the Bible verses she readily quotes.
"Rapture," the story of a young woman who has lost her family and her home, again captures the essence of both joy and sorrow. When a friend gives her a small glass egg, Etta is suddenly confronted with memories of her youth and her beloved family. Although buried woes emerge, she is also filled with newfound contentment: "Tourists waved. To her surprise, her hand flew up; she was waving back."
The rituals, struggles, and triumphs that the various characters in The Palace of Wasted Footsteps experience are personal yet universal. At the same time, they capture the subtle echoes of the American South and its literary tradition. Like glorious mayflies, Holladay's characters are forever enthralled in the frantic dance of life—their passions are strong, their fates inevitable.

The Palace of Wasted Footsteps: Stories (Volume 1)

University of Missouri

The Idaho Review is an annual Literary Journal published by Boise State University.

The Idaho Review, Volume V

HALL, DONALD

Schmidt, Geoff

McNally, John

Bass, Rick

Pearlman, Edith

CHERRY, Kelly

Minot, Stephen

Fincke, Gary

Bly, Carol

Mayo, Wendell

Thon, Melanie Rae

Harms, James

Whalen, Tom

BUSCH, Frederick

Idaho Review

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