The protagonist of Peter Malone Elliott’s debut novel, Blue Ridge, begins with this description of the Virginia landscape where he grew up: “Tinged with shades of blue, purple, and green, I always say the majestic, rolling landscape of the Blue Ridge is nature’s equivalent to the music of Patsy Cline—an inexplicably perfect cocktail of sumptuous beauty, haunting melancholy, and dark-edged mystery.” Horse trainer Cillian visits these old haunts (as he is quite literally haunted by memories) while en route to see his identical twin, a rising star in the Democratic party. Christopher is sophisticated and upwardly mobile—everything the gruff Cillian isn’t. But these two men aren’t total opposites: They have the same face, for one; the same taste in women, for another, and the same dark secret. That last commonality is the reason Cillian is coming to see his twin armed and decidedly dangerous.
That is just the beginning of the story.
This novel is a throwback through and through. The main characters’ have an abiding love for the playwright Sam Shepard, and Blue Ridge bears the imprint of his body of work. The women characters—the villainous Godmother, tough-as-nails journalist Daniela, ethereal intellect Audrey (cast, in my imagination, as a young Jessica Lange)—are easy to picture but hard to know or understand. Classic noir demanded virtually all women be either monsters or martyrs, at least at first glance, and this story doesn’t stray far from that template.
The political plotline also feels from another era. Blue Ridge is set in the present, name-checking figures like Tomi Lahren and Donald Trump, while the internet lurks at the periphery of the story. But Christopher is a politician who reaches across the aisle to work on health care reform, which strains credulity in the year 2024, as does the idea that a political kingmaker might hide her White supremacist inclinations and not brag about them on TruthSocial. What Elliott offers here is a wholesome story about loving trucks and hating racism; even presented in the jaded language of the genre, the story reads as more innocent than a Tuesday night newscast on CNN and would have benefited from being set a decade or more in the past.
Still, the appeal of Blue Ridge stems from its total commitment to the setting and the setup, all confidence and zero irony. Elliott skillfully intersperses immersive descriptions of the Blue Ridge mountains with flashbacks to the brothers’ coming of age, a traumatic childhood plausibly imagined and sensitively rendered. As Cillian recounts, his favorite Shepard play was True West, “a play about two brothers who are perpetually engaged in a game of one-upmanship, until one tries to strangle the other with a telephone wire. I’ve never read anything that nails brotherly hatred so accurately.” In line with Shepard’s work, Christopher and Cillian manage to feel lived-in as characters, even as their rivalry reaches staggering, dramatic heights.
Blue Ridge is briskly plotted and smartly structured, moving back and forward in time without making a single confusing or gratuitous move. And even while keeping the cast of characters blessedly small, the story still manages to offer surprises and twists. (I actually gasped a few times, but I might be an easy mark.) In this sense, Elliott’s expertise as a screenwriter shines through, with dramatic set pieces—for one, a very private conversation whispered at a very public political rally—that thrills in the way Hollywood does best. It’s easy to imagine this novel began as a screenplay treatment or could find its way onto the screen (big or small) in the years to come.
Despite some outdated elements, Blue Ridge will grip readers seeking a tense and evocative tale of big feelings, sparely expressed, and bigger sacrifices.
Blue Ridge, the debut novel from Virginia screenwriter Peter Malone Elliott will be released on Jan. 9 from Level Best Books. pmelliott.com.
