The call for submissions to the twelfth issue of Locust Review, “The Call Is Coming From Inside the House,” is now live. If you have a story, poem, work of art, essay, or review you think might fit the theme, then we want to read it.
Spend enough time in Appalachia and you can understand why its folklore is so unsettling. This is one of the most ecologically diverse regions on Earth, but also one of the most sparsely populated and geographically remote in the continental United States. Rolling mountains, deep valleys, thick woods that practically beg you to get lost in them. Few other dominions are more likely to host something simultaneously undiscovered and dangerous.
It is also, for not entirely unrelated reasons, one of the most historically rich parts of the country. They say many of the earliest European settlers found their way to Appalachia so they could live on their own terms, a tip of the hat to the strong Scots-Irish lineages in the region. Whether it's true or not, the long history of displacement, land grabs, ecological destruction, violent labor struggles, and yes, racial unrest, belie this wish. Considering how many “outsiders” tended to be people looking to do you harm – men from the mines or railroads, thugs and scabs kicking you out of your home – a healthy reticence is understandable. Deep down in the soil, hanging in the still air of this beautiful and unforgiving landscape, there are countless stories eager to take on their own life. That some take a supernatural form — ghosts, witchcraft, countless cryptids from the dwayyo to the snallygaster — is no surprise.
One of these is the mimic. You've likely heard of the mimic of Appalachia, or at least of the stories that continue up through Appalachians today. This is an entity — calling it a "creature" would be too precise — capable of calling to you in a familiar voice. Most often it is the voice of a friend or loved one, but it can also be your own. Its aim, so the tales go, is to either confuse you or trick you into coming near. What happens after that is a matter for the imagination’s darker corners. The most common advice is to calmly walk out of the area.
Some say the mimic is actually a raven, a magpie, or some other bird capable of copying what it hears. Others say that the voices of the mimic come from the infamous wendigo. In the end, none of us can say what a mimic looks like.
Or can we? If one of the primary characteristics of a mimic is its ability to avoid being sighted, why wouldn't it be able to hide in plain sight, keeping its powers and abilities hidden from onlookers? Why, when it isn't luring unsuspecting hikers to a possibly grisly end, wouldn't it be able to carry on an erstwhile normal life? Why wouldn't it be able to run for the office of Vice President?
J.D. Vance likely knows the stories of the mimic. So much of his political identity is bound up with Appalachia, and that has been deliberate on his part. It’s been apparent since the release of his book Hillbilly Elegy. Even after being repeatedly criticized and pilloried over the last decade — including many of Vance’s fellow hillbillies — not to mention a truly execrable film adaptation, this book which should have gone the dodo’s way of A Million Little Pieces is still seen by many as a legitimate treatise on what ails poor and rural America.
We can safely bet that Vance will be trotting out these embellished bona fides on the campaign trail over the next few months. Meaning that, much like Ohioans during his successful Senate run, we’ll be barraged with stories of his Mamaw and Papaw, his drug-addicted single mother, his dirt-poor upbringing, his time in the Marines, then Yale Law School and onto the world of venture capitalism. He will no doubt devote plenty of breath to describing in general terms the destitution that still hangs over the regions of his childhood — the poverty and deindustrialization, the persistent opioid crisis — and contrast it with his own biography.
He’ll then exhort voters to think of how every hillbilly deserves to take his path — and strangely, only his path — if only the globalists and woke elite would take the boot off their necks. The crowds will cheer. More to the point, they’ll be ready to commit their share of zealous, possibly violent acts to defend that vision. The thought of Curtis Yarvin, Rod Dreher, Peter Thiel, and other neoreactionary figures cited by Vance as an influence, put into practice from the bully pulpit.
There’s been ample space devoted elsewhere to pushing back against Vance’s vision of Appalachia. When you have a history that includes miners shooting cops and Pinkertons, an often steadfast respect for the surrounding nature, black and white and native and Melungeon living side-by-side, painting your own home as a racially homogenous, torpid backwater is going to be at best a fraction of the picture. Nonetheless, Vance’s descriptions chime with a certain view held by liberal and conservative alike: that of a community inherently narrow, instinctually conservative, largely white and, most importantly, completely inert.
Whether Vance believes every bit of his own bullshit is beside the point. Actions in recent years — most notably his journey from calling Donald Trump “America’s Hitler” to then sharing a presidential ticket with him — have shown him to be less than a man of his word. But among those who actually hold power, someone of Vance’s background who confirms their own views of the rural poor is tremendously valuable. There would be plenty of incentive for him to cling to them.
That is one of the primary takeaways from Gabriel Winant’s master class of an essay in n+1 on Vance, published not long after the latter took office as Ohio’s junior senator. As it turns out, Winant was at Yale around the same time as Vance, and the two met a handful of times. “I did not of course see in him the monstrous sociopath he turned out to be,” wrote Winant, “but even in our couple of passing encounters I could recognize him as a bullshitter, eager to ingratiate himself to wealthy liberals who couldn’t see his disingenuity.”
Winant also deftly points out that, however out-of-place Vance might have felt at Yale, he took it as something uniquely directed at him, rather than anything structural (much like his refusal to see anything truly structural in the conditions of rural America). Ironically then, his instinct wasn’t to rebel, let alone to try to change his own conditions, but to conform, to play the game by the rules of the privileged better than they ever could.
Vance naturally continues to speak to the struggles of his former homelands. He has to. It’s made easier by the fact that the rest of the establishment – including mainstream liberalism – has shrugged its shoulders at the industrial and natural disasters that devastate these regions. It took the Biden administration weeks to mount a meaningful response to the train derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio. Vance dithered a bit too, but Biden’s vacillation was easier to contrast with and made Vance look genuinely concerned. Whether he ever planned to follow through on calls for better regulation or safety conditions is beside the point, particularly because he didn’t have to vote down late 2022’s railroad strike. His former stances blaming the poor for their own poverty should tell us everything we need to know about where Vance’s “populism” will revert to when confronted with any working class – Appalachian or otherwise – looking to live on their own terms.
Of course, there is never any escape from one’s roots, at least not permanently. For as much as Vance may have resented the life of the rich and powerful, he clearly wants it more. The price is to be haunted by what he left behind. Cynthia Cruz, in her book The Melancholia of Class, “The specter of what the middle class imagine as ‘working class’ is always with me. In a sense, this specter is my double, my working-class self, the ghost of who I left behind when I left my home town, now hidden behind a palimpsest of tropes the middle class invented... It is where I come from, who I am and who I will always be.”
Little wonder then that Vance has spent so much of his public career obsessed with where he came from. Not all carpetbaggers come from elsewhere, and native sons can get away with more destruction than most strangers. If he is going to be so inexorably lured back to Appalachia, then he is going to turn it into what he always wanted to be. To do that, though, he’ll have to speak like what he once was.
Few need convincing that ghosts, monsters, and the supernatural play a huge and significant role in the modern psyche. Allow the unexplained and unexplainable to take on fantastical form, and we can get a handle on it, even if we cannot control it. Even if we understand its awesome ineffability is equal parts wondrous and dangerous, that it is fully capable of swallowing us whole, and of speaking back to you in the timbre of someone you love.
That something like the mimic might exist isn’t just horrifying because it can speak like you. If it sounds like you, can it look like you? Might it even be able to be you? Could anyone, including you, tell the difference? Who, ultimately, in this moment of such predatory ambitions, is the mimic?
J.D. Vance doesn’t have to answer that question, to confront the existential crisis he portends. We are all bound to watch for the next few months as stumps and stamps his way through Appalachia (and the rest of the country), his drawl now exaggerated, unsure if he is codeswitching or simply reverting to the speech patterns of his youth the way we all do when we return home.
He’s there to save Appalachia. Or to contain it and fence it off from the rest of the world. Once he might have been able to tell you which. Now the certainty is gone. But the rewards are great, so sincerity matters less and less. Ostensibly, he is unconcerned with finding what he lost, but what he lost may yet find him.
On the way back to the campaign bus, he'll pass a nearby wood – don't call it a forest in Appalachia; those are the woods – and stop to gaze at the expanse of twisted green sprawling upward across the hills and mountains. At first he won't know why he stands frozen in place for so long, what might have possibly seized his attention in such a strange way, luring his sight and sound into these dark canopies.
Then he'll hear it. A voice, calling to him. One he recognizes as his own. And it will be the most terrifying sound he’s ever heard.
Header image is an 1862 sketch by Dr. B. Howard of the Cumberland Gap.