In his debut short-fiction collection, The Way Things Always Happen Here, Kevin C. Stewart takes his readers to the scene of a heinous murder, to the home of an alcoholic single mother, to the
1960s election campaign of JFK through West Virginia, and off the side of the New River Gorge Bridge. With eight stories set in fictional Oak County in southern West Virginia, and one novella,
"Margot," set in the Arkansas Ozarks, Stewart gives us characters who all love and hate where they're from. In "One Mississippi," two teenage boys test their friendship and face their deepest
fears. The eponymous "The Way Things Always Happen Here" is a wrenching tale of two teenage lovers coming of age in a place that can't hold both of them. "Debts" pits an artistic son who has
chosen basket weaving as a profession against the wishes of his father, a miner and UMWA member. The startling "June Hay" picks up again the father/son conflict.
