Saints at the River is an environmental novel. It’s the story of the last wild river in the American South. In the wake of the rise of the global environmental movement since the Kyoto Protocol (2005) and the landmark publication of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), American eco-fictions have become aggressively more strident and unapologetically didactic. Environmental fictions of the new millennium create cartoon villains—ruthless land developers, myopic business cabals, self-serving politicians, backwoods hillbillies interested only in their jobs and deeply suspicious of outsiders—and they create heroes uncomplicated by faults—quixotic tree-huggers with an intuitive sense of the integrity of nature and an uncompromising faith in their campaign to protect from our own carelessness the very ecosystem that keeps us alive.

Rash, his family’s roots in the Appalachian South going back generations, offers a far less simplistic world. The stakes are too high for simplification. His novel’s developers and politicians are hardly cut-out two dimensional caricatures. Instead, the community of Tamassee is itself a complex social-political-economic structure with a complex relationship to the wilderness around it. The developers and dam engineers who speak at the community hearings are judicious in their vision and guarded in their agenda. The business leaders with a vested interest in edging away from the strict government protection of the land established 40 years earlier see both their own profits and the long-term wellbeing of a dying town.