Three decades (1946, 1957, 1968), three summers, and three families in southern West Virginia are the subjects of this trilogy of novels. The Gate of Paradise ...At any rate, the novel itself doesn't wave incest-and-all-that in the reader's face at all. It's simply about an American family, no more troubled or degenerate than any other that has been living in the same place for a couple of centuries, getting ever gnarlier and more dysfunctional, whether in Appalachia, Louisville, or Boston. This family lives up a holler in Logan County, West Virginia, in 1946. All of its members walk on in Chapter One and mill around rather bewilderingly at first, but the reader gets them straight soon enough. The narrative viewpoint shifts constantly from character to character, but the center of the novel's experience is six-year-old Keith Brousek, half Slav and half 'reglur' hillbilly. The main people in his life are his mother Ruby, who has been sleeping around since her husband William took off and joined the Army, and his best friend Franklin, an epileptic older cousin who most people (for no good reason) believe is retarded. Keith also has a great briery tangle of other relatives. After several chapters exploring the family's dynamics, the plot's couplings thunder into motion when William returns and announces his intention to take Keith away with him. This danger to Keith creates another link between him and Franklin, whom some people want to put in the state home, a fate he dreads like death itself. Neither event occurs, but the novel, though often funny, doesn't end happily ever after. Thematically, The Gate of Paradise is dominated by the classic Appalachian conflict between flesh and spirit. Flesh knows what spirit knows,/But spirit knows it knows, said Charles Williams; but in this novel, it's mainly the flesh that gets to tell what it knows. If there's a male character whose pecker isn't described, I missed him. Keith's grandmother Leah is a wrath-spouting preacher who backslides spectacularly and hilariously out of exasperation with the world's blindness. But the satire of mountain Christendom is gentle. You don't need nothing but spirit to follow Jesus, says Franklin to Keith; and Keith at his great-grandmother's funeral is literally transported in spirit by St. Paul's words about the general resurrection. If some of Depta's characters despise, it is only because it dies. Mutual forgiveness of each vice, said Great Blake, Such are the gates of Paradise. The relations between men and women are another matter of the novel, and each side has its bitter say. Depta writes prose like a poet; when he takes us inside a character's head, which is most of the time, we not only see with her eyes but smell with her nose and feel with her whole skin. She gazed at the soft arcs of light on her breasts and plucked at her nipples. They hardened like the toasted tips of meringue. Yum. This novel's aesthetic and moral content is first-rate, though it'll probably be appreciated everywhere but in the schools and libraries of the region. Depta promises it to be the first of a trilogy, and this reader looks forward to seeing Keith grow up among these people who, for all their troubles, at least aren't kept in a cage all their lives where Church and State know hillbillies belong. --Rodger Cunningham, Journal of Appalachian Studies, Vol 6, Nos 1 and 2 Idol and Sanctuary ...the shadow of coal lies behind the action: the disintegration of mining communities after WWII; the decaying mines and coal tipples; the burning slate dumps; the black streams and rivers. In the foreground of the present is Keith, the protagonist and unhappy teenager who has his first romantic affair as he redies to leave the disintegrating coal fields. Teenagers with their sensibilities, says Depta, like bushels of wind, scatter themselves profligately over the landscape of the present, agitated by intense passions, involved in callow self-pity one moment and selfless love in the next, those best moments of altruism when they acknowledge a mature sorrow and the world's worth. --Wind Magazine, Spring/Summer, No 73 The Gate of Paradise ...There are no heroes in this novel of an inbred West Virginia family in the mid-1940's. Depta paints a deft portrait of a community whose understanding of life extends no further than the fulfillment of immediate desires. These are a people without purpose or direction, mindlessly occupied with excessive drinking, promiscuous and often incestuous sex, and fervent religion. It is humanity as its most basic level, and it is a compelling story. --The Virginia Quarterly Review Vic Depta has had published ten books of poetry (The Creek, The House, A Doorkeeper in the House, The Helen Poems, The Silence of Blackberries, Preparing a Room, Azrael on the Mountain, The Little Henry Poems, An Afterthought of Light, and The Dancing Dragon Poems), two volumes of comedic plays (Plays from Blair Mountain, Mountains and Clouds), four novels (A