Interview

A Conversation with David Joy about When These Mountains Burn

In your fourth novel, When These Mountains Burn, you once again return to western North Carolina, which has become your literary terrain. What is this novel about?

I'm never good at answering this question and it's because I read, "What is this novel about," as a philosophical question when it's almost always a question of plot—What happens? What happens is that a father loses his son to an overdose and sets out to clean up his community when it becomes obvious law enforcement won't. In that way, it's a sort of Gran Torino look at the opioid crisis in Southern Appalachia told from the perspectives of the father, an addict, and the DEA. As far as what the book's about, though, the heart of it, I think it's a novel about cultural extinction. It's about what Maurice Manning called, "the gone and the going away."

Each of your books seems to hone in a particular timely issue. What drew you to write about the opioid crisis?

Heroin really started to take hold of the community where I live over the past five or six years. That's not to say that there wasn't a growing opioid problem before that, but it really became impossible to ignore more recently. You started seeing sharps containers put up in gas station bathrooms. ...