Hundreds turn out for 'Cold Mountain' author at Raleigh bookstore - NBC17.com
Thunderstorms didn't deter hundreds from welcoming Charles Frazier back to Raleigh for the release of his third novel, Nightwoods.
The bestselling author of Cold Mountain spoke at independent bookseller Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh on Friday evening, and signed copies of his books for fans.
Quail Ridge owner Nancy Olson remembered Frazier stopping by the store throughout his seven drafts of Cold Mountain. "Nightwoods is different. It's a heck of a great story, but it's his same beautiful writing, his use of language," Olson said.
Nightwoods tells a story of love, suspense and murder set in the southern Appalachian Mountains in the early 1960s. A young woman named Luce inherits her sister's two children, who witnessed their mother's brutal mother at the hands of their stepfather. As a result of the trauma, the children are mute, which presented a unique challenge to Frazier.
"It became like describing a silent movie. I had to try to make them vivid without being verbal," Frazier explained, "'The small, the beautiful, the violent' was the first thing that popped into my head."
Frazier's risk has paid off. The Washington Post review raves, "Sorry, haters, but this is a fantastic book: an Appalachian Gothic with a low-level fever that runs alternately warm and chilling."
In Nightwoods, Frazier draws inspiration from his North Carolina childhood, referencing the 1960s Nashville radio he picked up from Asheville as a child and returning to the native language of his first two books.
"I try to get back to a language that had a life, that had a kind of improvisation to it," he said.
Frazier left his job as English professor at N.C. State to write full-time in the late 1990s. He now divides his time between his home in Asheville and a small horse farm in Ocala, Fla., with his wife, Katherine, and their daughter, Annie.
01 Oct, 2011--
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