John F. Blair recently merged with Carolina Wren Press to create a revitalized publisher—simply called Blair—run by a nonprofit foundation dedicated to the literary culture of the region, including books founded in that tradition but that reach way beyond North Carolina and even the South. This coincided with the resurgence of a vile and dangerous white supremacist movement that carries sinister echoes of 1898.
Thus, the events depicted in Cape Fear Rising—which ought to feel like dusty old history by now—are suddenly all too relevant to our current civic life. So we present the story again for a new generation of readers, the same cautionary tale: If you don’t tell the story in its truth, you relive it over and over again.
And we ask the same question: Can’t you see that?
Note: Portions of this essay are adapted from “The Novelist of History.” North Carolina Literary Review, no. 24, Spring 2015.
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