Floodgate

A former West Virginia coal miner encounters corruption and cultural upheaval working on a dam project that will submerge his town.

In the remote corner of West Virginia in the 1960s, former coal miner Lance Drennen takes a job as an overseer for the construction of an immense flood-control dam, which will drown 2,800 acres of land that have been in his and other local families for generations. When Lance witnesses a terrible accident and discovers irregularities on the site that are guaranteed to line the pockets of the company and the local government, he must decide whether or not he will become a whistle-blower.

With incredible eloquence and clarity, Matthew Neill Null sets in motion the characters who will tug at either end of Lance’s life: his wife, Johnny, the adoring daughter of a hell-raising radical coal miner, who has withdrawn into her own world, and Jim Koss, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Koss is the only person who can draw Johnny out, and he becomes Lance’s confidant. But Koss has a secret history: he had been fired from the Washington agency designing the dam because of his Communist sympathies.

In a most concrete and riveting narrative, Floodgate explores the social and economic upheavals of the era—labor unrest, political and corporate corruption, persecution of Communists, the devastation of the environment—and their powerful impact on powerless communities. It is a story of loyalty to family and community, moral responsibility for personal choices, corporate greed and environmental destruction, and the depths and limits of love.

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