Michael Amos Cody is a professor in the Department of Literature and Language at East Tennessee State University.
After working as a songwriter in Nashville, he earned his PhD in English from the University of South Carolina.
His short fiction has appeared in The Tampa Review, Yemassee, and other publications, and his albums include Homecoming and Wonderful Life. Gabriel’s Songbook is his first novel.
A Twilight Reel: Stories
Feathered Quill WINNER 2022
This new collection has been called “pure Joycean,” a “symphonic, nuanced portrayal of our contemporary Southern Highlands,” and “an extraordinary collection from an extraordinary writer.”
Its twelve interrelated tales are set over the course of a year—1999, as Y2K approaches and the world of Runion faces its own tumultuous changes. Like Thomas Wolfe’s Altamont, Runion stands in for places Cody grew up in and knows as only a native son can do. Here he presents a vivid portrait of a community in an age of rapid change, learning how to understand and embrace the new despite the frequent pain and fear of the transition.
The stories
In the opening tale, a local preacher is taken captive by a fallen predecessor and struggles to escape before his own sins bring him down as well. As the winter progresses, an elderly woman inches closer to madness, and murder, as the freezing cold brings her inexorably closer to death.
In other stories, a music professor worries about his new life if he and his lover are the only gay men in a rural college town; and neighbors watch with trepidation as a failed church is prepared for a new, unsettling role—as a mosque for the area’s small but growing Islamic community.
Over the summer, a conservative local business owner faces the revelations that his own son, a young musician who left long before, is gay and HIV-positive—and has come home at last, but only to die. Months later, after vigilantes have burned him in effigy, the young fiddler uses his last burst of energy to give an impromptu farewell performance at the local drive-in theater—which, like him, is facing its imminent demise.
The autumn sees a widower rekindles dreams he once had of Marilyn Monroe, and a portrait of small-town death and birth emerges through visions of the dead that relentlessly visit a simple-minded gravedigger. Finally, as the year comes to an end and her last shift ends, a university custodian contemplates abandoning her husband and her small-town life in favor of stepping out into a world anxious with Y2K fears.
It’s no wonder that Robert Morgan (Chasing the North Star) says that “Cody’s is one of the most authentic and inspired voices in contemporary Appalachian fiction” who “speaks for both the region and the world beyond.” Or that Linda Parsons (Candescent) calls him “the masterful caller of the reel, leading us into mystery, time, a little magic realism, and possibly redemption—ever mindful of the living and the dead.”
And what greater praise can a writer achieve than these words from fellow Appalachian writer Leah Hampton:
What wonderful stories these are, rooted in mountains I know so well! Cody blends traditional and modern elements, wry humor, spooky darkness, and his intimate knowledge of the region to bring us a deftly rendered Appalachian story cycle…. This is a real gem.
A Twilight Reel is available now through bookstores everywhere, or through online retailers.
Gabriel’s Songbook
A living portrait of the artist as a wayward musician, Gabriel’s Songbook is the story of a musician whose talent carries him from the hills of Appalachia to the grime and glamour of Nashville and back home again. This finalist for a Feathered Quill award is gritty and lyrical, rock ’n’ roll and old-time country; it transports the reader deep into that age-old dream of making the big time, and shows us the beauty and pathos that lurks underneath.
Gabriel’s Songbook is described by other writers in glowing terms:
“What a wonderful book! Artistic ambition, first love, small-town Appalachian life, the image-obsessed machinations of the Nashville music industry: all ring so authentic, so true. Michael Amos Cody’s first novel is gripping, poignant, and unforgettable.”
~ Jeff Mann, author of Country
“I came to care for these characters so much I wished I could step into the book and warn Gabriel and Eliza of the perils ahead of them… Gabriel’s Songbook resonates like a great ballad, a song of love and struggle that keeps chiming in the ears long after the final note is played.”
~ Jesse Graves, author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine and Basin Ghosts
“Behind the glaring lights of Nashville, the late nights, seedy managers and bad deals, is a beautiful tale of redemption and a love story that will stick with you long after the novel is finished. Cody is not just a wonderful writer but a top-notch musician and songwriter as well… This is the best novel of the music business I’ve come across in a very long time.”
~ Mark D. Baumgartner, Editor, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature
“[T]his is a book that strives after Hemingway’s maxim to write one true sentence, and Michael Amos Cody does that without fail. Gabriel’s Songbook is a novel full of heart and longing, and it deserves its distinguished place on the shelf with some of the best stories of the region.”
~ Charles Dodd White, author of A Shelter of Others and Lambs of Men