Book Review: Readings

The Town on Beaver Creek: The Story of a Lost Kentucky Community

by Michelle Slatalla

Random House, 242 pp., $24.95

In The Town on Beaver Creek, Michelle Slatalla sets about telling the story of Martin, a small Kentucky town that three generations of her family once called home – before it was bulldozed, that is. Written in novelistic style, the book manages to be remarkably thorough without seeming academic or sterile. Slatalla has clearly done her research and leaves no anecdote untold, no townsperson unmentioned.

Luckily for Slatalla, and for us, most of these are worth mentioning, like Doc Walk Stumbo, who rode down the church aisle on horseback and ran – successfully – for sheriff after a stint in prison for embezzling government money. His most serious adversary ran an ad in the town paper stating, "I will give the office personal attention, as I have nothing else to do." Small-town politics are a constant source of humor: In another unlikely election, an outhouse cleaner was named county coroner over an undertaker, solely by virtue of his fortuitous first name, Judge.

Martin's inhabitants barely needed help becoming characters. It takes a certain kind of person to stay in a town that floods annually, ruining walls and floors and leaving a persistent musty odor in the air. It also takes a certain kind of person to live on in the memories of the current townspeople, and since much of Slatalla's research was conducted in interviews, only the most extraordinary stories survive. Slatalla only calls one story into question: an account of her uncle Red singlehandedly punching out a bull (she consults an expert, who admits that while it's not impossible, he'd be interested in knowing how big Red's hands were).

Of course, we remember more than the extraordinary about our family, and a majority of the book is about Slatalla's, the Mynhiers. Many of their stories are less stupendous than those of local legend, but they provide the book a narrative thread that it would otherwise lack. While The Town on Beaver Creek is filled with memorable scenes, Slatalla's sense of structure is a bit off-kilter. She seems so anxious at times not to leave anything out that she sees opportunity for digression at odd and sometimes inappropriate moments. Her colloquial voice is better at conveying humor than heartbreak, causing some of the more dramatic stories to read strangely and others to sound impossibly quaint. On the whole, though, it's a fitting memorial for an unusual town and makes one wonder how many other towns' stories have been lost.