What would you hold on to if your world was washing away?
Howard Lynch lived a life measured in silences. The silence of his rural Pennsylvania upbringing. The silence of his grief-stricken home in Wolf Valley. The silence of his novelist wife, Amber, lost suddenly a year ago. His only companion? An adopted dog named Cobyâa four-legged reminder of a life he could have had.
Then, the river starts rising.
With a relentless storm stalled over the region, Howard is faced with a devastating choice: Escape to safety or risk everything to save a life that represents his last link to Amber.
Weaving between the flood and the intricate love story that leads up to Amberâs tragic passing, Murray paints an intimate portrait of a complicated man whose life was marked by obstacles from his earliest years.
Autumn in Wolf Valley is a story about the things we lose, the unexpected gifts we find, and the enduring power of forgiveness. It's a reminder that even in the darkest depths, hope can rise. And sometimes, the greatest love stories are the ones we never see coming.
What would you hold on to if your world was washing away?
Howard Lynch lived a life measured in silences. The silence of his rural Pennsylvania upbringing. The silence of his grief-stricken home in Wolf Valley. The silence of his novelist wife, Amber, lost suddenly a year ago. His only companion? An adopted dog named Cobyâa four-legged reminder of a life he could have had.
Then, the river starts rising.
With a relentless storm stalled over the region, Howard is faced with a devastating choice: Escape to safety or risk everything to save a life that represents his last link to Amber.
Weaving between the flood and the intricate love story that leads up to Amberâs tragic passing, Murray paints an intimate portrait of a complicated man whose life was marked by obstacles from his earliest years.
Autumn in Wolf Valley is a story about the things we lose, the unexpected gifts we find, and the enduring power of forgiveness. It's a reminder that even in the darkest depths, hope can rise. And sometimes, the greatest love stories are the ones we never see coming.
You have probably never heard of Wolf Valley. Most people havenât. Before last fall, I was one of those people.
Its flood was a forgotten tragedy in American history, overshadowed by 9/11 and the war and eventually Katrina, I presume. But retelling that story was now my job. I have spent the last few years trying to break into the freelance writing world. The gig came from one of my most reluctant clients, a small literary magazine based in the northeast that you have surely never heard of. Why they cared to run an anniversary article on the flood more than 20 years later I am not entirely sure, but I wanted to nail it.
The assignment was to document the progress that has been made since the flood. âTalk to some locals,â my editor said. âGet a feel for how things have changed, whatâs rebounded, what new struggles persist. Find a story to tell. Make it human.â So thatâs exactly what I did, packing up the car and kissing my wife and baby girl goodbye. It took me about seven or eight hours to reach the valley. As the Wolf River winds, the state highway traces the bends and small towns appear along the wayâLivingston, Huell, Elmswood, Jefferson City. For the better part of two days, I stopped into coffee shops and gas stations and librariesâanywhere I thought there would be people who could help me tell this valleyâs story.
I met some interesting characters along the way, that was for sure. One man owned a barbershop that flooded and so he spent nearly 48 hours sitting on the roof in the rain. I met two sisters who were asleep in the same room when a tree came crashing through their ceiling, pinning them to their mattresses until help arrived hours later to cut them free. But the most interesting story came, as they often do, sitting in a bar.
This was a weekday afternoon and I was occupying a stool going over notes and listening to interview recordings I had made. It was one of those local haunts: low ceilings, dark even in the middle of the day, walls lined with beer signs and pictures of local high school teams. Despite some decent leads, I was feeling discouraged about my prospects of spinning a good story to the tune of eight thousand words, as my editor requested. The bartender was a young woman who looked to be flirting with the legal drinking age herself, with tanned skin and long, black hair that was braided and draped over her shoulder. She must have noticed my angst and brought me another Yuengling.
âWhatâs eating at ya?â she asked.
I sighed and set my pen down on the bar. âIâm supposed to be writing a story about this valley,â I told her.
âWhat about the valley?â
âAbout the flood, basically, and how the area rebounded. I canât imagine you have any stories yourself,â I said, a nod to her age.
She smirked, still holding an empty pint glass with a thin layer of amber at the bottom swishing back and forth. âIf youâre writing a story about the flood, thereâs a guy you should talk to.â
The next day, I walked into the same bar to meet a man named Howard Lynch. I found him sitting at a table near the back, reading a worn copy of The Empty Hills of History, a novel I hadnât read since high school.
âMr. Lynch?â I asked as I stepped toward him. The first things I noticed were his hands. One was wrapped around a coffee mug, making it look more like a shot glass. He donned a white undershirt and had close-cropped gray hair that was receding. For a brief moment he ignored me, then he glanced my way and then back at his book, all without changing the expression on his face.
âYou want to know about the flood, or you want to know my story?â he said more as a statement than a question.
Unsure how to respond, I asked if I could sit down. He nodded toward the vacant chair across from him. âWell, sir, Iâd like to know it all.â
âEveryone wants to know it all these days,â he said and then finished his coffee. âLet me ask you, do you like stories? Because if you have some time, I have one you wonât believe.â
ââââââââ
The assignment, as I said, was to write eight thousand words for the literary magazine. I didnât do that. Instead, I passed on the assignment altogether and wrote this book.
This is Howardâs story.
Warning, spoilers.
What does a man do when he has lost everything? Not nearly everything but everything. Does he turn to despair and drown his sorrows does he look for blame or does he look to find a light something to hold onto and find a better reason to keep living? A story of loss, grief, love and ultimately redemption. Autumn in Wolf Valley by Ed Murray delivers a truly beautiful story that expertly crafts a manâs struggle to cope with the devastating loss of his wife and the fight to keep alive her last remaining gift to him.
The book begins by placing our protagonist Howard Lynch at the lowest point of his life. With nothing left to live for Howard has a plan and that plan is to end his own life as swiftly as possible once he reaches the bottom of his whiskey bottle. Trapped in a house with his dead wifeâs dog Coby, Howard can do nothing except hate himself and reflect on what once was. The story then jumps back in time to Howardâs youth and what Howard Lynch is used to is abandonment and loneliness. With his mother leaving him with his deadbeat of a father Howard survived the trauma of his youth by finding an escape in books. A journey through adolescence into manhood, Murray asks us a good question. How does a man become a good man when all he is exposed to is a poor example of one? Can Howard break from his past and find meaning in his life? This is a theme pulled through the book as Howard does what all of us do, the best we can.
The novel is also set in a world before smart phones, so for any younger reader this story is a great way to experience what life would have been like prior to the advent of social media. What did people do when they met up? How did people plan things without being able to swap phone numbers and double check details on WhatsApp beforehand? Chance encounters really are chance encounters and if you do not act quickly enough then opportunities will pass you by. It seems almost farfetched to some people today but the idea that a young man could move halfway across a country looking for work and then have a meeting a three-hour drive away with just an address and a name to go on was how people lived prior to 2007. This adds something magical to the love story between Amber and Howard. A fleeting night can turn into years of regret and angst and if you did not act on things and make the right gesture then life not only passed you by, but you lost it. This gives the book a quality of timelessness that is hard to find in modern fiction writing. Unusually it makes the story feel like it belongs to a different world a world that none of us inhabit any longer and for some reason this made me quite sad.
What the author does so well in this novel is bring Howard to life and deliver a character that is so damaged and broken by the world he grew up in that it is nearly impossible not to empathies with him and understand his reckless decision making. Howard is far from perfect, but Howard is relatable. Howard is no maverick; he is no great hero or warrior or scientist with a breakthrough or cure for a virus. Howard is barely holding it together and doing everything he can to build a life with Amber and while he meanders through his life all you can hope for as a reader is that Howard does not end up like his father. Yet the author begins to leave hints that Howard is creeping ever so slowly to the image of his father the man he despises and does all he can to avoid. We often repeat more than we begin anew. Can Howard avoid the sins of the past or will he be subsumed by what has gone before him?
On a negative, the pacing is a touch slow to start but really picks up once Howard meets the love of his life in Amber McNamara. But this feels deliberate as we have been taken back to a time without the ability to swipe left and right. We have forgotten our own ability to go slowly so the author does this for us. Some of the other characters need fleshing out more and this does feel like wasted potential as the description of Literary misfits of Michigan is superb but then they never really go anywhere. One can only assume the adventures in New York were for Amber and Amber alone. The same happens to Willy who drifts out of Howardâs life yet had the potential to be the closest thing Howard had to being a brother, this could have been a nice counterbalance to Howard which never seemed to happen.
Then there are the dogs. As a dog owner myself the use of dogs by Ed Murray to convey the emotional integrity of the story is unique and wonderful. How can the author make you feel every bit of pain that Howard feels when he has to make a decision that no dog owner should ever have to make? Coby is both an anchor for Howard but also the life vest that keep him going despite his spiraling state a reminder of the past but also a shot at redemption, Coby is perhaps the innocence that Howard never had after such a short upbringing. Then there is the month of autumn. There is a lovely nod to writers of old especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald. The nod to Fitzgerald and that life can sometimes begin again in autumn is a theme throughout the novel, restarts and rebirths occurring just when the season is changing provides a wonderful mirror to Howardâs perpetual self-doubt and inner darkness. If isolation and loneliness are Howardâs internal state, then he finds himself living in a world full of color and transition and it may just be the only thing other than Amber that keeps him going.
I would highly recommend Autumn in Wolf Valley. For any romantic out there who has a love of literature, then Autumn in Wolf Valley will strike a chord with you. The literary references are scattered throughout and there is a treasure trove of wisdom in this book which puts it beyond your typical romance in reverse story. Ed Murray delivered a book that has a soul and depth to it that I have not found in a very long time, and I will give some of his previous novels a read, I feel as if I stumbled across a real treasure.
4.5 out of 5 stars.