A Late Flooding Thaw, by Gary Guinn. Siloam Springs: Moon Lake Publishing Company, 2005. $24.00, Hardcover. ISBN 0-9755950-2-4.

In this debut novel Guinn chronicles the spiritual life of the town of Delaney, Arkansas during the end of the nineteenth century and into the beginnings of the twentieth century. The novel focuses on the Bass family, a group of hardly ever do wells who move into town and take over the old sawmill when the owner’s health fails.

There isn’t much to do in Delaney other than work and go to church. This leaves ample time for gossiping and the Bass family is a prime source for gossip. No one really knows where they came from or how they managed to take over the mill. They don’t go to church, they drink, Virgil Bass, the family patriarch, is as mean as can be, and his wife Lily is a shut in. But if life is mean and short, then a mean life is even shorter, and Virgil has soon passed beyond. After that the family house burns down, taking Lily with it, and Henry, the oldest Bass son, is left with his brother Walter to keep the sawmill cutting. Then one day Walter stumbles into a church revival and takes up with Emma, the favored daughter of the town. Soon they are wed and Delaney feels as though it has lost itself. And Walter and Emma’s hardships have just begun.

The novel is alternately narrated by Walter Bass, Emma, Purity Morrison— a spinster who once carried a torch for Walter, and Naomi Bass, the wife of Henry Bass. They present portraits of the town and of their lives in lyrical prose which is very readable. The overlapping narration makes the story much more interesting, as the narrators have sometimes opposing points of view on things, and it serves to enrich the story.

This is a quiet book, full of suffering and death, loneliness and hardship. The people of Delaney have little to carry themselves through other than religion, but Guinn doesn’t treat prayer as a cure all. They are religious in the same way they are Americans; it’s something they are born into, and they wouldn’t know any other way to be. There is something of winter in these people’s lives, and in this book; they are all dying back, waiting for a spring to come.

-CL Bledsoe