By Rob Stout
Enquirer Contributor

Silas House's much anticipated second novel comes in the form of an unusual love story, but one that remains steeped in the mountain culture central to his critically acclaimed 2001 debut, Clay's Quilt.

The setting is Kentucky, but could be anywhere in Appalachia. The time, however, is firm. It is 1917, a period just before modernity and technology began robbing the region of its traditions, when ballads were passed down through generations and the language still had traces of its Scotch-Irish forebears.

It is also the last time when members of the Cherokee tribe cohabited with hill people, and this becomes the means by which readers are introduced to Vine, a mystical Cherokee girl working a farm on a supposedly bewitched mountain top.

Drawn to the mountain in search of work are Saul Sullivan and his younger brother, Aaron, who falls victim to the curse and is bitten by a poisonous snake. Vine's shaman-like rescue of Aaron puts her and Saul on a course that soon leads to their marriage and her attempted assimilation into Appalachian culture after the couple return to Saul's native hollow, curiously named God's Creek.

Narrated by Vine in a dream-like and distant voice, her transition at first appears effortless. Throughout the novel's central section, we follow the rhythms of Vine's new life during the passages of marriage and motherhood, set before a backdrop of Mr. House's word-perfect descriptions of a seeming mountain ideal:

"The sky was a bright gray, and the sun shown itself like a silver ball hung there, so smudged you could look right into it. The snow drifted down and frosted the big rocks lining the creek, clung to thin tree branches. It stood like sugar in the yard."

Mr. House turns the same sharp attention to Saul and Vine's marriage. Of their first meeting, Vine recalls, "I had always believed that somebody touching your head is a sign of love, and his doing so got to me so badly that I felt like crying out. I knowed exactly how cool my hair was beneath his fingers, how his big palm could have fit my head just like a cap."

Saul's eventual departure during the war widens the implied intolerance expressed by the people of God's Creek toward Vine. "I was not a regular face to these people, I was only Saul Sullivan's wife," she remarks at one point. Vine also must contend with the unwanted physical advances of an emboldened Aaron in a thin subplot that leads to his violent demise and pushes the story toward its conclusion.

Much of the novel has a genesis in fact. Mr. House's grandmother was a Cherokee woman who married an Irishman. While this serves as the obvious heart of the story, an even more central experience, one that now could be considered an established theme for Mr. House, lies in the loss of connection to old and established ways, and the persistence of the past that many of Mr. House's characters feel long after the separation has been made. Vine and Saul confront the pull of the past and the push of the present. Just how they deal with the dilemma, so wonderfully crafted in the novel's epilogue, underscores some of the more tentative truths about human nature and, more importantly to understanding this poignant and personal statement, the emotions that are behind them.

Silas House will sign A Parchment of Leaves 1 p.m. Sunday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Madison and Edwards roads, Norwood, (513) 396-8960.