It is coming in the warming water and the columns of the upper air. In the convergence of massed air and the tilting face of the sun. It is coming from the islands of the Cabo Verde west of Africa where the tradewinds, which once filled the sails of ships jammed with the captive and enslaved, make warlike commerce with other masses of air and form the beginnings of the storm. The hurricane, the god of the coast whose Passover is August and September, and which, before it was a god, was and remains a function of the earth’s need to temper summer, a colossal cooling mechanism. Around these giants the weight of the world shifts, the atmosphere thins to vacuum, and were you to stand at the right height in one’s eye you would be sucked skyward with the planet’s hot updraft and dissolved among the brilliant clouds to fall as particles of rain. It is coming for them in the summer that begins with arrows and ends with the beginning of the Great War. And it has no name. We can no more name the storm than we can hold the wind in our hands or know the nature of love.
Isaac knew from the moment he saw her, screened by a cut of smooth cordgrass waving in the wind off the bay, that she was the one from the portrait. The shoddy painting on the wall of the bedroom in the Woolsack house on Deer Island—the daughter, Kemper. It had been years since that day, but he remembered. They were not ten yards from one another, in opposite cuts of the marsh, where he’d spent the better part of the afternoon sketching ribbed mussels and a needlefish sought by a crane, and she, it seemed, was poaching a crab trap.” – THE NEW INHERITORS
Deep South Magazine is pleased to reveal the jacket art for Kent Wascom’s forthcoming novel THE NEW INHERITORS, designed by Kelly Winton. Scheduled to publish in July of 2018 by Grove Press, THE NEW INHERITORS continues Wascom’s story of America through a single family and region—the Gulf Coast of the United States—that began with his previous novels THE BLOOD OF HEAVEN and SECESSIA. In 1914, with the world on the brink of war, Isaac, a nature-loving artist whose past is mysterious to all, including himself, meets Kemper, a defiant heiress caught in the rivalry between her brothers. Kemper’s older brother Angel is hiding a terrible secret about his sexuality, and her younger brother Red possesses a capacity for violence that frightens even the members of his own brutal family. Together, Isaac and Kemper build a refuge on their beloved, wild Gulf Coast. But their paradise is short-lived; as the coast is rocked by the storms of summer, the country is gripped by the furor preceding World War I, and the Woolsack family’s rivalries come to a bloody head. In what might be Wascom’s most powerful novel yet, THE NEW INHERITORS explores the beauty and burden of what is handed down to us all. At once a love story and a family drama, a novel of nature and a novel of war,THE NEW INHERITORS traces a family whose life is intimately tied to the Gulf, that most disputed, threatened, and haunted part of this country we call America.
