The Last House on Slag Road

About this book

In the fading coal town of Barren Creek, West Virginia, sixty-eight-year-old Delores Mooney is the last resident of Slag Road, a street the county wants condemned for a strip mall nobody asked for. Wiry, sharp-tongued, and marked by a limp from the mining accident that took her husband forty years ago, Delores has spent decades keeping her own counsel. That changes when a demolition notice arrives on the same week her estranged granddaughter Cassie shows up pregnant and running from a man who hurt her. Refusing to be erased twice in one lifetime, Delores turns to courthouse records, a library computer, and long memory to fight the county—only to find the condemnation traces back to a land deal her own father struck decades earlier, one that saved her brother's life and doomed her home in the same stroke. The novel moves between that present-day fight and 1984, when a young, pregnant Delores discovered that the coal company had falsified the safety reports that led to the explosion which killed her husband and thirteen other men—and was pressured by her father-in-law into signing away the truth for a settlement check. As both timelines close in on each other, Delores must decide whether unearthing a decades-buried fraud is worth what it will cost her family's name, her standing in town, and her granddaughter's understanding of who she has always been. Told with unflinching regional texture and a dialogue-driven, slow-burn intensity, this is a story about how the choices we make to survive can become the walls we later can't get out of.

Book details

Genres:

Drama, Literary Fiction, Appalachian Gothic, Family Saga, Mystery

Language:

en

Published:

2026-07-09

Content rating:

R