Nitro Mountain, the debut novel from Lee Clay Johnson, takes place in a particularly poor corner of Appalachian Virginia. That poverty informs just about everything about the place where this story unfolds. The characters are constantly trying to escape it — through drugs, alcohol, and music mostly — but are also defined by it.
The novel is harrowing and dark, an unabashedly fierce and often violent novel that owes as much to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock as it does to Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone and a particular grotesque vein of Southern literature.
The story begins focused around Leon, a bass player and a drunk (not necessarily in that order) who’s fighting to get his estranged girlfriend Jennifer back while also trying to figure out what the hell to do with himself. A bad fight, a busted arm, and a DUI later, Jennifer seems long gone, but Leon’s chance comes from Jones, a local singer-songwriter who offers Leon a gig playing with him on tour.
Jones plays classic country tunes, the tear-in-your-beer sort of stuff that romanticizes exactly the kinds of loss and hurt that seem to circulate Nitro Mountain like a foreboding breeze. It’s so faint and consistent, these people can hardly feel its constant effect upon them. Playing this music, as it turns out, does Leon no favors, as he’s the kind of guy likely to get lost in this sort of romance. During a gig early in the book, Leon is trying to fight off the pain in his arm while he plays:
I ordered a beer through the stage-right mic and when it came I chased down some painkillers with it. The mixture worked a little bit but mostly it just fucked me up. The pain was still there, only now it seemed to be something outside of my body, a growth you could see. I got this idea it had a personality, that it and me were two different things.
Leon is a man literally broken, but here we see the way in which his fractures — both real and symbolic — run deep. He separates himself from pain, through music and drugs, rather than dealing with it. So he can’t let Jennifer go, and she’s not keen to let him go either, but Leon also doesn’t seem interested in finding his own path. Instead, he lets Jennifer keep him occupied, or rather, uses his “love” for Jennifer as an excuse to not grow up. Still, the story seems to set Leon up as a possible moral center, especially when he agrees to help Jennifer get away from her new boyfriend, Arnett, by poisoning him.
Arnett is the dark, psychopathic center of this novel. Arnett involves himself with just about any kind of depravity you can imagine. He films girls in the bathroom of the bar he works at. He takes and doles out all manner of drug. He beats Jennifer. And, as Leon gets closer to him, he learns of other outlets Arnett has developed for his derangement:
[Arnett’s] face was swollen to the point of looking like he’d been stung by some huge insect. His also owned guns. A lot of them. Since moving up here, he’s developed the habit of going killing — not hunting — and then preserving the corpses with homemade embalming fluid, filling the rooms upstairs with them.
Arnett is a character incapable of remorse and very much capable of more carnage. Leon and Jennifer try to make a stand, but as it goes wrong, the story veers away from Leon and focuses on Arnett and, at times, on Jones. Nitro Mountain seems to set them up as foils, but the link doesn’t quite take.
Jones has his own volatile relationship with an ex. He drinks and takes plenty of drugs — a seeming requisite to live in the world of this novel — but his outlet is song. Those around him seem to think he’s good, that he has potential, and he spends his time mostly trying to write the song that will get him out of town. He’s stuck on the lines, “If I had my way I’d leave here tomorrow / Hitch up a ride and ride on down to Mexico / But there’s just one thing I gotta do.” He can’t quite figure out the verse ends, how the song will go, but the book suggests this is building up to his big break.
Nitro Mountain has a good sense of tension and of moving plot forward. Leon and Arnett and Jennifer and Jones all crash into each other, and their stories and troubles tangle together — along with plenty of others in the town. The problem, though, is that the focus here is on the action, on the sheer velocity of the mounting troubles and violence in this book.
Arnett storms throughout this tale, and while the pain he inflicts is shocking, he’s stuck as a character. He’s not some sociopathic cipher, a force of will we’re not meant to understand. But he’s also not charming enough to win us over in the way classic psychopaths in literature can. We also can’t empathize or sympathize with him, even when his own pain bubbles to the surface.
“What he did to Jennifer,” he thinks drunkenly to himself late in the story. “That’s a large dull thing in the middle of his chest fucking up his breathing.” But at this point it’s too late. We’ve seen him do too much to find a connection in those words. Johnson’s skill with Arnett, and the other characters, is in the surprising detail. Arnett has a Daffy Duck tattoo that keeps oddly making an appearance, and his tear ducts sometimes won’t stop leaking.
While these details surprise, however, they don’t add layers. Like the book’s inhabitants, Nitro Mountain is stuck inside its own borders. It can’t get past the violence it creates to find any meaning or larger story within it. Jones finds his closing line, “I don’t want murder on my soul,” but he also never had to encounter or deal with any of the death and destruction in this story, even the small bit of it he is tied to. Instead, this small country song seems to be his ticket out. Maybe it’s that he can express the pain of that place in a way that others can’t, that lets him escape.
Jennifer’s fate, however, suggests that’s not enough to build this story around. This is a book focused very much around men — Leon and Arnett and Jones — and the women read more as wagons hitched to these dying stars. Jennifer, in particular, gets short shrift. The book never gives her space to carve out her own wants or needs. They are all filtered through a man.
“Always had to have a guy there,” she admits about herself at one point. “Actually, I liked having at least two guys. One to run away from and one to run off with.” Even as she walks through life with scars on her body and face inflicted by the men she’s encountered — and not just Arnett — there’s no sense she’ll ever get an out. No sense there’s room in all this violence for her own story.
Nitro Mountain has a keen sense of place and a keen sense of tone. It’s a novel that knows the heavy impact of violence, and handles it with a relatively deft hand, considering the curse-filled dialogue and overwrought scenes of drinking and drugs. But as the tale splinters out in different directions, from this character to that, the story itself breaks down too. So while the hard details of this book might stick with you, what it might be asking about poverty and violence underneath it all will likely remain elusive.