Fire and Fate

A young Alabama farm boy named Charlie is about to lose his beloved grandfather, Clarence. In the throes of his illness, the older man is unable to finish a familiar family story he’s always loved to tell. At this wrenching moment, Charlie assures Clarence, “I’ll finish telling your story, Grandaddy.” Hearing this from his grandson, Clarence nods, “lifts his old, wrinkled fist from the white sheets and pats it against his chest.”

Charlie cannot know in this moment that, soon, his family will wake up to a changed reality: the sudden, violent appearance of a volcano in their cow pasture. This perplexing event reshapes more than the landscape.

Nature anticipates us because it is us. We belong to its vast, unfolding story, not the other way around. This truth rumbles at the core of Bradley Sides’ debut novella, The Volcano Keeper.

Sides, who has written frequently for Chapter 16, is the author of two previous short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood. He currently lives in Madison, Alabama. He writes with skillful detail about Charlie’s rural farm life in the 1960s, and the added lo-fi fantasy element of a giant volcano somehow fits right into this story’s world.

“It’s not the sun that wakes them. It’s the ground,” Sides writes about the volcano’s fateful arrival. “It rumbles softly at first. As if it’s hungry. Or hurt. But it doesn’t find immediate comfort, so it expands. Bigger. Angrier. In the distance, a mixture of collisions and splits. Like a rock crashing. Or a tree falling. A hundred. A thousand. More.”

The moment of the volcano’s emergence has coincided with Clarence’s death. In his last days, Clarence had mysterious dreams foretelling the volcano, as well as Charlie’s subsequent role as the “volcano keeper.” According to these dreams, one day Charlie will see all his beloved dead, including Clarence himself, inside the volcano’s crater when it finally erupts. But for now, the volcano stands seemingly dormant, except for powerful earthquakes that occur every time someone dies in their rural county.

As the years pass, Charlie must choose whether or not to stay on the farm and fulfill the mysterious role given to him by Clarence. In this dilemma, Charlie makes a specific kind of protagonist — one whose essential goodness takes precedence over internal conflict. To some readers, he may seem surprisingly incurious about these strange events: “He doesn’t wonder so much why the volcano is there; he wonders why he is the keeper.” Even this questioning of his own role seems to drift lightly into and out of the story.

But The Volcano Keeper displays some qualities of a fable, and Charlie’s role in this story serves the larger imagery and themes. These themes are made overt in the novella’s potent central premise. And despite the fact that grief and loss experienced across this rural county create seismic damage that threatens Charlie’s farm, the tone generally stays warm and relatively light. Moments tinged by darkness are leavened by warm reminiscences of Charlie’s family life.

With The Volcano Keeper, Bradley Sides has created a compelling premise for the novella form. When he writes that “Charlie admires the beauty of his small, miraculous world,” this gentle sense of gracious affection extends to the novella itself.