Fast Falls the Night by Julia Keller
Thirty-three overdoses, including three dead in less than 24 hours is the grim statistic facing law enforcement authorities in Ackers Gap, Raythune County, West Virginia. All are victims of the “Appalachian virus,” that’s what they call it in Julia Keller’s latest novel Fast Falls the Night. For the rest of us, it’s known as the opioid crisis.
That crisis has been a staple in our headlines of late, a wretched addiction that has become the biggest health calamity of our day, taking the lives of so many who are feeling lost, left behind, economically challenged, people living a life of despair.
Even though West Virginia has the highest rate of deaths from opioid addiction in the country, my first thought was that Keller was taking some novelistic license by building a novel around that many overdoses in such a short period of time. It didn’t seem realistic. Turns out, it is completely realistic. The Cincinnati Enquirer took a look at the opioid epidemic in their region and reported that in the space of one week there were 180 overdoses and 18 deaths. Keller herself was informed by a visit to her hometown of Huntington, West Virginia where in a space of four hours twenty-eight heroin overdoses, including 2 deaths, were reported.
The addicts in Ackers Gap are consuming drugs that have been laced with carfentanil, as County Deputy Kyle Hunsacker informs prosecutor Bell Elkins “it’s a hundred times more potent than fentanyl – the usual stuff they use to stretch out the heroin. It’s used to tranquilize elephants., if you can believe that.” Elkins is on a race to track down the suppliers and get the word out to potential consumers that this stuff is a bad batch.
To do that Elkins has to work with law enforcement, medical teams, anyone in the community who can help spread the word. Keller focuses mostly on the cops, Elkins’ colleagues in the prosecutor’s office, paramedics and how officialdom deals with this crisis. In doing so, she gives us some insight into the challenges that this epidemic provides for a small community with limited resources that has to make some tough decisions about how their money is spent.
For prosecutor Bell Elkins there is no question that this is their responsibility. She doesn’t see that these “addicts” have no one to blame but themselves, that there isn’t much to do when someone voluntarily takes these drugs, a lost cause. Her assistant prosecutor is more ambivalent. Rhonda Beauchamp Lovejoy is a hometown girl, who came home after law school “Her hometown was disintegrating, and damned if she didn’t have a front row-seat for it. Drugs, poverty, violence, isolation. Lopped off mountaintops. Crooked politicians.”It’s as if the despair and fatalism of the place infects everyone there.
Sheriff Pam Harrison feels just about the same as Rhonda, opposed to a strategy to use limited resources to warn addicts “Keeping tabs on addicts, chasing a dealer who probably didn’t know that he or she was selling a lethal form of the usual product—it was a waste of time. There were so many other duties she’d had to put off for this. It offended her on a level so deep that she felt as if she was walking around in a state of low-simmering rage.”
As the novel progresses, that “low-simmering rage” makes sense. They have to call on resources from neighboring counties to help deal with the deluge. The paramedics are overwhelmed “This was now officially the Land of the Lost Cause. Urgency was pointless. The girl on the floor was gone.” Even as they are administering naloxone to overdose victims, the victims themselves seem to resent the interruption of their high from a lifesaving drug. It’s no wonder there is a sense of disdain on the part of those tasked with helping cope with this epidemic
For Deputy Sheriff Jake Oakes as he tries to reach out to known customers and dealers his contempt is clear. On tracking down a lead to the suppliers he is at an apartment complex known to house addicts “Jake didn’t have much sympathy for these people. They had known exactly what was going on in this apartment. Most of them were doing the same thing in their apartments.”
As the casualties mount it is clear that nobody is immune from the Appalachian Virus, the poor and destitute, a young woman brought up in a well-to-do, loving environment, a pillar of the community lawyer who made his money in the now dying coal industry, and the pace at which it is striking in this outbreak is almost too fast to catch up with.
Keller resists the temptation to find good guys and bad guys, to neatly tie up the mystery. Her lens is narrowly focused on the ambivalence of law enforcement and their view of the epidemic, a view that doesn’t get much coverage in news. It’s an interesting choice to make and one that provides for some unvarnished assessment of the crisis. While we do get some backstory into a few of the characters afflicted with the “virus,” it doesn’t really explain their motivation to go down this path. The book is unresolved (in a good way) which I hope means that the next installment of this series will build on the solid grounding of this one.
BEFORE YOU READ:
Length: 286 pages
Genre: crime fiction
Themes: opioid crisis, law enforcement, economic despair
Commitment: As fall arrives, this is the perfect book to curl up with. Just add hot cider, and turn on the do not disturb sign, and you can take a visit to a place you’ve probably never been to.
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