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The Witch’s Grave

by Phillip DePoy

The Witch’s Grave coming out of his ears, and at least some of it is evident in The Witch's Grave. In this book, his setting is Georgia's Appalachia region, but unlike Sharyn McCrumb's wonderful tales of the same location, Phillip DePoy tells of a more updated area where almost everybody has a TV – yet underneath the modern façade the old superstitions and habits still exist. Mr. DePoy excels in many disciplines, theatre and music being among them. But if he continues to write this well he may find himself best known for his murder mysteries, and his name spoken in the same breath along with the most famous and well-read authors of this genre.

Fever (only in Appalachia!) Devilin was raised in the Appalachian region of Georgia, escaped to the cities, became a college professor, and eventually a folklorist. To escape his unusual first name, most folks call him Dev. Yearning for a simpler life than the city offered, he returned to his roots. Now, while his love Lucinda is away, he's entertaining Dr. Andrews, who delights in the food found in Devilin's home mountain region.

The first corpse is a nude body of a man found in a ditch, with three drunk, laughing teenage boys looking at it. Skidmore Needle, Dev's best friend and town deputy, comes to take over, and the corpse is identified as Harding Pinhurst the Third, the town's only mortician. Meanwhile, Able Carter and Truevine Deveroe (Truvy) have had a lover's quarrel within hearing of a number of people, but have since both disappeared.

Truvy, only twenty-three years old, is the local witch. She has black hair, a black dog seen occasionally with her, and has been known to do spells. The fact that she uses both spells and her knowledge of plants primarily to heal doesn't preempt the appellation. She had been living with her three brothers, Donny, Dover, and Dixon. Since there's been no sign of Truvy since her disappearance, they think she may have been murdered by Able. The brothers are now out for his blood, and even attempt to hang him.

Dev tells Andrews Truvy's story – how she thought she was going to marry Harding's brother, Rud Pinhurst. Instead, Rud had found himself a wealthy girl and wed her – working for her father and living in a big house. Then, strangest of all, how over a rather short span of time he grew visibly older and bent, and at last disappeared completely. People seem to think he left the state for good three years ago.

The search for Truevine and Able takes Dev first to the home of the Reverend Hezikiah Cotage and his wife, June. His subsequent investigations, with Andrews dragged (usually unwillingly) along, involves him with Gerlinda, Skid's (Skidmore's) wife, a clutch of vagrants ensconced in a graveyard crypt, and Rud's sudden reappearance as well as the home of the three Deveroe brothers, which has been 'sealed' by one of Truvy's spells.

Inextricably mixed with folklore and superstition, the grisly discovery of over three hundred bodies allows authorities the obvious motive behind Harding Pinhurst's murder. But the biggest surprise comes at the end of Phillip DePoy's novel when the murderer is at last unmasked.

In The Witch's Grave, Phillip DePoy furnishes his work not only with a great deal of local Appalachian color but an intriguing mélange of rumor, the unexplainable, and fact. Mr. DePoy gives us just enough to doubt the reality of a situation, then provides a factual, realistic answer. It takes a very clever writer to accomplish that. Yet the overall feeling when you've put down the book for the final time is still a question – might not there be something to this supernatural business after all?

Maybe. I'm sure Phillip DePoy knows.

Alan Paul Curtis

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