The Volcano Keeper

The Volcano Keeper

By Bradley Sides

Regal House Publishing; 2026

Paperback: $18.95

Genre: Southern Fiction

Reviewed by Edward Journey

In a 2024 review of Bradley Sides’s short story collection, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, I used the word “audacious.” Sides’s hugely different but equally audacious new offering, The Volcano Keeper, is a beautifully wrought novella of love, grief, persistence, resilience, and miracles set in pastoral Alabama, where the death of a beloved grandparent results in the emergence of a volcano in a cow pasture. One of the book’s vignettes ends with the words, “The scene. The words. They linger.”  Those words could serve as a review of this startling, beautiful book.

Anton Chekhov’s great play, Uncle Vanya, is subtitled “Scenes from Country Life,” and those four words kept occurring to me while reading The Volcano Keeper. Charlie Melvin is nine when The Volcano Keeper commences in September 1962. He eats watermelon with his granddaddy who will die soon but predicts a miracle to come. From that point, life and death proceed in a series of short, dated vignettes chronicling the next twenty years of Charlie’s life. There are scenes of shelling purple hull peas on the front porch; the bliss of a chocolate pie; huddling in the storm cellar during a March tornado; birthing a cow; first and forever love blooming; learning a biscuit recipe; Junebugs on strings; a beagle puppy named Rufus; a rat snake invading a birds’ nest; the gift of a grandfather’s pocket knife; a river baptism; a Southern snow; lightning bugs in a jar; kinfolk waving goodbye as they drive away … All as a volcano hulks nearby.

Sides’s prose is neither maudlin nor sentimental. It is blunt and direct, with an economy that says all that needs to be said – often on an almost empty page. “The sun rises. The sun sets. Everything in between is lost,” Sides writes after a particularly harrowing occurrence. Historical events are evoked but rarely dwelt on. June 11, 1963 – a key date in Civil Rights history – happens and Charlie and his cousin Rhett have questions. On July 21, 1969, Charlie and Rhett are fishing and looking at the sky after the moon landing; “Sometimes we just gotta believe in things that are bigger than us,” says Charlie.

With Charlie Melvin, Sides has created a lustrous portrait of boyhood, dutiful manhood, and dedication. When Charlie’s mother asks what he’s thinking about doing after he graduates from high school, his forthright reply comes: “Not really much thinking to do. I’ll work at the factory, do some farming, and keep up the volcano …”

When his minister asks Charlie how he can believe in both God and the mystical promise of the volcano, Charlie’s response is simple: “It’s called faith, Reverend.”

The Volcano Keeper reads like a dream of promise and redemption. It’s a secular statement of hope and optimism. A restrained energy permeates these pages, making the reader anxious to see what comes next. Bradley Sides knows when to stop and leave the reader to their own thoughts. More impressively, he knows when to push ahead and leave the reader breathless.

“The scene. The words. They linger.”

Edward Journey, a retired university professor and theatre professional living in Birmingham, regularly shares his essays in the online journal “Professional Southerner” (www.professionalsoutherner.com).