Blood Kin
by Steve Rasnic Tem
Summary
Michael Gibson has come back to the family land in the southern Appalachians because nobody else would: his grandmother Sadie is dying by inches, and he, the family's last drifting son, becomes her caretaker in a hollow full of kudzu and closed doors. Sadie has a story she needs him to hear before she goes, and the novel alternates her telling with his listening, the 1930s bleeding into the present a chapter at a time.
Sadie's story is the book's dark heart: a Melungeon girlhood in Depression era Virginia, the mixed race hill people held at the county's edge, a grandmother feared as a witch, an uncle, Preacher, whose snake handling congregation runs on ecstasy curdling into control, and the growing understanding that her family's strangeness includes the real thing, second sight, and something the community's faith and fear together called up and could not put down. What the 1930s buried, literally, an iron bound crate sunk in a shack under four feet of kudzu in the field below the house, waits through both timelines, and Tem is patient about the connection: Michael must understand her story completely, because the inheritance is his whether he understands it or not.
The kudzu itself becomes the book's presiding image, the green tide that swallows houses, graves and history impartially, the past as vegetation that cannot be killed.
Around three hundred eighty pages, told in a spare mountain cadence.
Best for readers who want Appalachian gothic with genuine folk horror underneath, family memory treated as the most haunted ground there is.
Historical Context & Significance
Blood Kin won the Bram Stoker Award for 2014, and it was received as a homecoming twice over: Steve Rasnic Tem, born and raised in Lee County, Virginia, in the heart of the mountains the book inhabits, had been one of the field's most respected short story writers for thirty five years, several hundred stories, a shelfful of category awards, the acknowledged master of quiet, grief soaked domestic horror, and the novel Stoker arrived like a career's overdue punctuation.
The Melungeon material gave the book its particular distinction, one of the first major genre treatments of the mixed ancestry Appalachian communities whose origins remain historically contested, handled from native ground rather than as exotica.
Tem's career, much of it built alongside his late wife and sometime collaborator Melanie Tem, herself a Stoker winner, continued prolific into his seventies; the field treats the two of them as its great married chroniclers of ordinary sorrow, and this novel is where his mountain inheritance got its fullest statement.