Author of

Monsters in Appalachia

2018 Weatherford Award Finalist

2017 Southern Book Prize Finalist

2016 Foreword Indies Finalist

 

 

 
 
 

 

Sheryl Monks is the author of Monsters in Appalachia, published by Vandalia Press, the creative imprint of West Virginia University Press. She holds an MFA in fiction from Queens University of Charlotte. Her stories have appeared in Rkvry Quarterly, Electric Literature, The Butter, The Greensboro Review, storySouth, Regarding Arts and Letters, Night Train, and other journals, and in the anthologies Surreal South and Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Contemporary West Virginia Fiction and Poetry, among others. Monsters in Appalachia is a Weatherford Award finalist, a Southern Book Prize finalist, and a Foreword Indies Book finalist. Read more…

 

Unflinching honesty and deep affection


“Sheryl Monks writes with unflinching honesty and deep affection about the Appalachia I know: a place of imminent peril to both body and soul, home to lingering ghosts. Her gorgeous (but never merely decorative) language generously limns the hard mountain landscape as well as the luminously-realized and all-too-human folks who struggle there. This collection brought me home again.”
 
Pinckney Benedict
Author of Miracle Boy and Other Stories

Delicate balance

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“Monsters in Appalachia is wildly outrageous at times but there is empathy in these stories as well. Humor and sadness achieve a delicate balance.”
 
Ron Rash
Author of Serena and Nothing Gold Can Stay

Touches of humor and magic


“Monsters in Appalachia introduces a fresh, new voice in contemporary fiction, in stories of teenage angst, bonds of family, motherhood, and contradictions of middle age. Always surprising, with touches of humor and magic, and seductive, snake-handling preachers, these stories conjure both sorrow and mystery with intimate loving detail.”
 
Robert Morgan
Author of Gap Creek and The Balm of Gilead Tree

Haunting


“Haunting, raw, terrifying, and passionate.”
 
Sara Pritchard
Author of Help Wanted: Female and Crackpots

Her Stories Continue to Delight and Haunt


“Sheryl Monks gives us such a range and depth of character in one collection. Her stories continue to delight and haunt long after reading.”
 
Renee K. Nicholson
Author of Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center

Rythmical, Soulful, deep


“There’s music in these stories–visceral, rhythmical, soulful, deep. They are siren songs, taking us places we otherwise might not go.”
 
Kim Church
Author of Byrd

Gorgeously written dispatches


“Sheryl Monks’s stories are gorgeously written dispatches from Appalachia, telling the difficult truth of what it is to survive in a place that can exact a heavy price. But these tales are generous too, and a particular grace sets on them all.”

 
Charles Dodd White
Author of A Shelter of Others, and Sinners of Sanction County

Freshley Electric and treacherous as hell


“These elemental stories take on the dark Appalachian territory of David Joy and Ron Rash with a kind of raw, absolute, female confidence. Coal miners, snake handlers, smart, scary women at their wits end– all at the mercy of their terrific landscape. Monsters in Appalachia offers a glimpse of the edge of a world that seems freshly electric, and treacherous as hell.”
 
Ashley Warlick
Author of The Arrangement, and The Distance from the Heart of Things

Original and multidimensional


“A memorable debut: each of these stories is as original and multidimensional as the characters who inhabit them.”

 
Kirkus Reviews
starred review

Ventures deep into the realm of myth


“Monks knows her monsters, both literal and figurative. And she knows the territory of hills and hollers, where reality is sometimes heightened so sharply that it bleeds into myth. The 15 ferociously compressed stories in her collection sear their way into the reader’s brain…”

 
Publisher’s Weekly
starred review

Granular and gripping


“Monks’ attention to immediate consciousness is granular and gripping… Monsters in Appalachia made me want to go back, at least for a visit. To write about Appalachia is to write about America, as Poe realized, even if that is also where monsters are, and Sheryl Monks reports from this countryside as only a novelist can.” 
 
Ryan Boyd
The Los Angeles Review

Unexpected turns, a thrilling ride


“Sheryl Monks’s Monsters in Appalachia illuminates a fictional terrain that is both achingly familiar and underrepresented. Monks’s Appalachia is a place of miners laboring in impossibly dangerous conditions, poor women with drunken husbands, greed, exploitation, and desperate love. But it’s also a place where middle class children are bullied and young girls have mothers who are just a little too hot. It’s a place that’s broadly recognizable and relatable, yet Monks presents her characters in ways that are largely unexpected. Her fictional worlds are drawn with precision and insight, revealing surprising truths.”
 
R.T. Both
Colorado State Univ., Center for Literary Publishing

Monks immerses readers into the working heart of Appalachia 


“Monsters in Appalachia is a brilliant collection of short stories, reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s darkness and sense of place. Sheryl Monks’s writing is strong and precise, drawing readers down the winding roads of Appalachia. Hers is a voice I eagerly await in another collection of stories or a novel.”
 
Allyson Hoffman
New Pages

Sheryl Monks steps up as a Gothic realist


“Though Flannery O’Connor has influenced many of our most realistic, Southern Gothic authors, there aren’t too many women excelling in the art today — except, it is now clear, for Sheryl Monks.”

 
Rob Neufeld
Citizen Times