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By John Hood

RALEIGH — If you think what has made 2024 memorable is a chaotic political campaign featuring multiple assassination attempts, a first-ever switcheroo at the top of the ticket, and the second-ever election of an American president to non-consecutive terms in office, consider yourself a political junkie.

I cover politics for a living. But these events, though clearly dramatic and consequential, will not dominate my future self’s memories of 2024. You see, this was the year that the first of my children got married. For me and my family, no mere election could ever rival the significance of my son’s wedding.

For other people, 2024 will be the year their first baby was born, or their last parent passed. The year they got engaged, or divorced, or their first “grown up” job. The year they lost their faith, or found it.

And for a large swath of North Carolinians, 2024 will be the Year of the Storm. Hurricane Helene took dozens of lives and disrupted the lives of many, many more. We will measure its consequences in billions of dollars, in years, perhaps in generations. As it happens, one of our fellow North Carolinians, my longtime friend Tony Woodlief, has just released a novel about life and loss, fathers and sons, marriages, faith, memories — and even, I kid you not, a deadly flood in our state’s western mountains.

Fate? It’s about that, too. I can’t think of a timelier read for these troubled times.

Published by Slant Press, We Shall Not All Sleep is a coming-of-age novel set primarily during the 1970s in the fictional North Carolina town of Hickory Shore. Here Woodlief keeps his fiction thinly sliced, however. If you’re of a certain age and spent lots of time in such places as Lenoir, Morganton, Spruce Pine or Marion, you’ll soon recognize your surroundings. His characters also travel to the likes of Asheville, Winston-Salem and Chapel Hill, just in case you lose your place.

Although the author folds many distinctive characters into this finely textured story, its central relationship is between Ray Waterson, a Vietnam veteran quite literally haunted by his violent past, and his son Daniel, whose own haunter is the spirit of the young boy Ray accidentally runs over at the start of the novel.

Daniel idolizes his war hero of a father, whose mystical powers make him the region’s most dependable “water witcher.” At the same time, Daniel resents Ray’s chronic drinking and the harm it inflicts on their family. He also resents his mother, not only for putting up with it but for trying to keep Daniel from growing up to be like his father. Love and hatred, reminiscence and regret — Woodlief masterfully weaves these emotional threads into a rich tapestry that yields its deepest secrets only to multiple viewings.

The novel is realistic. But, as you may have already guessed, it isn’t confined by realism. An early passage shows Daniel grappling with the death of the young boy and teases the reader with what is to come:

Daddy told me once: “History’s not written until the dead have their say.” We wrote some history in the coming years, the dead and me. Understanding them was not the power I wanted, but it was the one I received.

And that Army duffel in his Jeep, the one I imagined once carried my father’s weapons of war? Ten years later I would shoulder my own, and realize that a soldier’s duffel holds mostly food, clean socks, and letters from his mama. But between the day we killed that boy and the day my own death summoned my father’s wraith, I would come to understand that the man everyone else knew as Ray Waterson had no need of weapons. My father was the killing thing.

Whether 2024 brought you joy, sadness or some combination of both, reading We Shall Not All Sleep may help you make sense of it. What more can a reader ask of a novel?

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member.

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