When Zak Jones began writing his first novel, he crafted a story that was purely fictional with exaggerated storylines, or so he initially thought.
But with Donald Trump’s presidency and the unsettled and volatile American political landscape, what once were outlandish stories have become very real and believable.
Set to be released February 17, Fancy Gap is the story of three generations of a family living in the isolated Appalachian mountains of Virginia and North Carolina.
The family’s grandmother, Grace, has abandoned her family to become an evangelist catering to a disheveled group of worshippers whose devotion is maintained through charismatic preaching and the dispensing of stolen drugs.
Her daughter, Jane, struggles with the painful effects of breast cancer and its treatment, made worse from having to express endless gratitude toward an insular church community that reluctantly supports her.
Jane's eldest son, Dalton, has been discharged from the army under conditions "Other than Honorable,” accused of breaching the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. He reluctantly returns home, driven by guilt and love for his younger brother, Messiah.
Messy — named Messiah at Grace’s insistence — is an awkward teen who’s constantly teased. Guided by faith and tortured by abandonment, he eventually develops a twisted moral code shaped by isolation and anger.
With challenges including opioid use, poverty, illness, veterans’ issues, frayed family bonds, and misguided religious faith, Jones paints a vivid picture of the struggles of an American family.
“It's certainly not a feel good story,” says Jones, a PhD candidate and course instructor with the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Department of English. “This book is more Crime and Punishment than it is Where the Crawdads Sing.
“I started writing the story in 2018 during the first Trump presidency and my idea was to dramatize real-life circumstances that people in the Deep South are facing,” says Jones. “And any astute follower of the news would note an uncanniness to the goings on in the U.S., where it's all very real, but it seems stranger than fiction.
“And so even though I was trying to write something outlandish — in the way most good fiction is an exaggerated caricature of a real-life situation — it ended up being almost gritty realism.”
Jones wrote much of the story as a mature student of U of T, putting words on paper while working at Wise Bar in Toronto’s west end which closed during the COVID pandemic. “I worked there every Saturday and did my homework downstairs,” says Jones.
In that basement, Jones, to some degree, followed the idea “write what you know,” though he doesn’t encourage that approach for his younger students.
“I was lucky enough, and unlucky enough, to be a mature student when I started at U of T and I'd been in the army and around all kinds of craziness my entire life,” says Jones. “And so I wrote what I knew to be true of the Deep South, of poverty and of the slippery slope of fundamentalist Christianity and all its ramifications.”
He also knows the region, having grown up in the foothills and mountains of Virginia and North Carolina. He’s fascinated by this area of the United States, with its long history of conflict and mistrust.
“There is a kind of untetheredness,” he says of the region. “The further you get into the mountains, the more eerie and unpredictable they become. And there's a history of this phenomenon that goes back hundreds of years.”
In that region, there remains a high element of mistrust of the government, of outsiders, of laws and rules and even of change and modernity.
“The writer Harry Caudill wrote a book called Night Comes to the Cumberlands and it introduced this idea that the Appalachian region was being overlooked by most of America,” says Jones.
With the decline — and in some areas, near collapse — of coal mining and a reluctance to modernize the economy, the region suffers from high unemployment, poverty, food insecurity and the opioid epidemic.
"But the novel isn’t only about regional socioeconomic difficulty or cultural challenges,” says Jones. “Fancy Gap is a about struggling people in a beautiful place, and what happens when whole communities are left behind. All the nightmares in the text, and in the region, flow downstream from much broader problems in America.”
Shifting from the book’s setting to its characters, they too were created from some of Jones’s lived experiences, paired with his imagination.
My goal with writing this book is not to advocate for anything, but to match in fervor the harsh realities of our contemporary moment, and to articulate their severity through a coalescence of crises: misguided religion, abject poverty, the opioid crisis, the disintegration of so many social safety nets.
“Grace is modeled, in terms of her personality and her figures of speech, directly after my grandmother, including her addictions and proclivity for conspiracy theories,” says Jones.
Messy is modeled, in part, after his younger brother, with Jones noting that much of the brothers’ backstory was inspired by memories of their youth together. And Dalton’s military career and the struggles faced by military personnel are loosely tied to Jones’ time serving as a medic in the army.
“They ended the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in the middle of my tour of duty,” he says. “I knew a few men who were very secretive about their sexuality and had to be very secretive about everything they did. It was heartbreaking.”
Though the book presents a somber view of American society, Jones insists Fancy Gap isn’t a polemic.
“I work very hard to resist doing that,” he says. “For many authors in my generation and younger, their text relies on who they are or what they think. There’s usually an underlying insistence that they are correct about a specific topic, or a political viewpoint.
“My goal with writing this book is not to advocate for anything, but to match in fervor the harsh realities of our contemporary moment, and to articulate their severity through a coalescence of crises: misguided religion, abject poverty, the opioid crisis, the disintegration of so many social safety nets. I want readers to see how messy these concepts are and to feel a sense of adequate desperation measured to this desperate moment in American history.”