In Em J Parsley’s You, from Below, the speaker climbs an Appalachian mountain to deliver an envelope after their holler town falls apart. The speaker is the only survivor. Along the way, they meet folks and gather their stories of “rapture and decay.”
This slim novella punches lyrically through landslides and loss, punctuated by often unexpected but thoroughly grounded tenderness. The characters reach for each other, and the writing itself reaches out to us, written entirely in the second person, like the speaker is writing us a letter from far away or standing beside us in the kitchen chopping carrots for tonight’s supper. In this book, “you” can be anyone, which gives the reader an opportunity.
Several subcultures in the U.S. use the second person to tell stories, especially in the deep south, especially in Appalachia. While it might take some folks a minute to get used to, the invitation to do so is a gift of heritage and oral tradition. In sophomore writing workshops, a common critique hinges on the need to see the narrator or the main character. Sometimes, a visual image or a label is important. But leaving the label and the image to the reader is also a significant and specific act. The reader can be anybody. The reader can be you. So, too, can the writer. Reading it, you get to decide if you picture yourself or someone else stepping through rocks and vines on your way up the mountain.
Whether you want to accept it or not, this book invites you to climb through lush fauna and crumbling buildings, ascending a topography that is rarely explored with depth or nuance by popular media. A woman melts into the leaves and shadowed branches of “heavily canopied woods.” Rabbits twitch, staring at you, disappointed that you aren’t offering them food. We learn that “lumber towns tend to empty out once they’re past their relevance,” lakes can stretch impossibly, and everything—wisdom and religion and community and whole towns and even you, everything—can collapse or probably will collapse eventually.
Despite that collapse, the read isn’t heavy, and while we might be touring an unfamiliar place, the writing doesn’t remake the reader into a tourist. The lines swing between rich, musical phrases and casual, regional phrasing. Like when the speaker stands with one of the strangers they meet during their climb, “There’s a rumble behind the two of you. She hums. ‘There goes the roof. When the foundation collapses, you’ll run.’”
Or, “[Gran] blamed this strangeness on your Mama, and was plenty vocal about it.”
Or, “The brightness of the scent twists sharp—something rotten.”
Or, “You were loved, and you were lonely, and you were not alone in this phenomenon.”
This intersection of being loved, loving, and loneliness thrums underneath the plot, and the tangle of dissonance that this thrum creates connects the speaker to every creature they meet along the way and also, to you and me and all of us, seeking connection through the detritus of lost time or lost homes or lost people. Isn’t loss the most profound and vulnerable map to connection?
Even if your life and land look nothing like the characters in this modern fable, it’s easy to imagine yourself on a long climb, carrying an unopened envelope, afraid to read the last words of someone you’ll never see again folded inside. Of course, we want the speaker to open the letter. Of course, we probably think we’d never make it to the of the mountain without tearing through the paper ourselves.
This is the tension that keeps us reading, embedded in the second person format. There’s a chasm between the unopened letter and the fact that the novella itself is written like a long note to the reader. The promise of this book weighs far more than the book itself. By the end, the letter and the promise are delivered, and that deliverance lands in your body just like a story my Mamaw might tell, or like a song, where the feeling of it—and what you learned along the way—are what stays.
You, from Below, by Em J Parsley. Split/Lip Press, February 2025. 54 pages. $14.00, paper.
Asha Dore is a journalist and illustrator with recent bylines in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Business Insider. Find her at ashadore.net or on Instagram @adjsbb.
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