TWILIGHT IN HAZARD
An Appalachian Reckoning
From Pulitzer Prize finalist and investigative reporter Alan Maimon comes TWILIGHT IN HAZARD (June 2021), the troubling account of how a perfect storm of events made a devastating impact on the residents in small Appalachian towns— a case of severe and accelerating rural distress that, over the past twenty years, has expanded to send tremors through the rest of America.
When Alan Maimon, fresh off a reporting stint at the New York Times’s bureau in Berlin was given the assignment late in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him to cover the region “like a foreign a foreign correspondent would. And sure enough, when Maimon arrived at his post in Hazard, Kentucky, he felt like an outsider. He had arrived in an area that was already in the grip of ecological devastation and was about to descend full-bore into the corporate-made epidemic of prescription pain pills. It was also a place where vote-buying and drug-motivated political assassinations were the order of the day.
Maimon would spend five years embedded in Hazard, immersing himself in the cultures, the families, and the folkways of Eastern Kentucky, covering stories of every possible description. The result is TWILIGHT IN HAZARD, a powerful chronicle of what he witnessed there firsthand —the intense religious alliances, the bitter political rivalries, the faltering attempts to emerge from its century-old coal-based economy.
Maimon would learn that this was a place suffering from generational struggles that were the result of uniquely American forces.
The book also tells the story of Maimon’s return visits to Hazard and the region In subsequent years, now as the husband of a Harlan County coal-miner’s daughter. He would find the area struggling with its very identity, deep in the thrall of the ideological quagmire of Trumpism.
But TWILIGHT IN HAZARD refuses to mythologize the world of Eastern Kentucky and its Appalachian neighbors. It makes a plea to the leaders in the region to move past their fixation with coal as a central industry, while at the same time illustrating the perils of allowing local journalism to die out. This is an intimate portrait of a population forced to stare down multiple types of pernicious forces—some from the past, some the present, and others awaiting in the future.
Many of the characters Maimon writes about in this riveting book could have stepped right out of the acclaimed F/X television series Justified, possessing as they do some of the same mixture of sardonic humor and noirish venality. TWILIGHT IN HAZARD offers a panorama of a land that —once again—is in danger of being shunned and forgotten, while the American media turns its gaze away and retreats from this epicenter of rural distress.
Praise for TWILIGHT IN HAZARD
“Maimon...eviscerates Vance’s [Hillbilly Elegy] with stiletto precision... TWILIGHT shines brightest in describing some of the area’s colorful characters... They are fully and generously portrayed... Maimon has written a worthy addition to the collective body of smart rebuttals to Vance’s book.”
“An empathetic portrait of Eastern Kentucky... Contending that Americans must ‘combat the notion that people and places are irredeemable’... Maimon’s sharp observations and personal stake in the subject make this a standout account of what ails rural America.”
“In tight, compelling prose, Twilight in Hazard takes us directly to the heart of one of America’s most serious problems: the decline of local news. This book, with its indelible sense of place, may break your heart but it may also strengthen our collective resolve to find solutions to this crisis before it is entirely too late.”
“A searing and revealing account of what happens when jobs disappear, institutions collapse, politicians grandstand, and the very middle of America gets hollowed out by greed and indifference.”
“Twilight in Hazard chronicles the decades of taking that Appalachia has weathered,
but it also chronicles the strength and resiliency of the human spirit of those who have
been left behind. This book is harrowing, angering, and, most importantly, true.”
“Twilight in Hazard gives the great FX show, Justified, a run for its money, and then some. A riveting read.”
“Alan Maimon is right to make An Appalachian Reckoning the subtitle of this wise,
compassionate book, where truly ‘We gather in our memories and reckon up the cost.’”