For the past couple of years Ron Rash has seemed poised on the cusp of becoming a household name. Comparisons have been made to William Faulkner’s southern Gothic and Ernest Hemingway's brevity, but the voice of this Appalachian writer is singular, often quiet and frequently uncompromising.

Just as his 2008 novel, Serena, explored the issue of conservation consciousness against the backdrop of a 1930s lumber business, Above the Waterfall returns to environmentalism.

In an unnamed North Carolina town, the county sheriff, Les, is about to take early retirement at 51. Solid and hard-working, Les takes backhanders from weed dealers and tries to come to terms with his wife’s near-suicide and their subsequent divorce.

Arriving in town with comparable baggage and a traumatic past is Becky Shytle, newly appointed park ranger and sometime poet. In their first encounter Becky comments on an Edward Hopper painting on the wall of Les’s office: “Even Hopper’s boxcars are alone.” Soon the two are engaged in a relationship that feels like a “wary out-of-step dance”.

Shifting voices

Chapters alternate with both voices: Les’s weary tone of trying to keep the town on track, and Becky’s lyrical contemplation of the world and of her own past. This shift also leads the reader into the past lives of both characters. Becky, the witness to a mass school shooting, has trust issues, and later gets romantically involved with a terrorist. Les feels that he coaxed his ex-wife to her drastic action and can’t fully shake the guilt of it.

Rash expertly gears up and down between the sheriff’s dialogue-driven encounters with other characters and Becky’s interior world, including her poetry. Rash published several collections of poems before turning to the novel, and his grasp of metre and the mot juste are evident in Becky’s voice.

Becky’s complicated history leads her to be protective of Gerald Blackwelder, an elderly man of the land who clashes with the local hotel fishing resort over access. A diesel spill kills all of the trout in their local habitat (the book’s title) and Gerald becomes the go-to suspect, even if Becky refuses to believe it.

There are other possible perpetrators, including Gerald’s nephew and his meth-addicted girlfriend, but the novel is only partially about solving the mystery. Rash wants to show us a small-town goldfish bowl with all its unglossed horror: a baby in a microwave; the local pawnbroker’s shop guarded by a rattlesnake; a meth addict’s “eyes sunk deep in their sockets, teeth nubbed and coloured like Indian corn”.

Hard landscapes

The landscape is essential, exerting a psychological effect on the characters, who are all just trying to get by. Lives are reined in by lack of money and education, and by drug addiction. Becky quotes her beloved poets, but this place is no Hopkins pastoral. Gerald once built a timber house for his only son; after the boy was killed in the Gulf War he torched it.

There is an uneasiness about the resort’s catch-and-release angling for rich tourists, and the contempt in which it holds the impoverished residents. All lives are connected from way back, so the distinction between who has made it and who has not is a daily, visible thing.

“In a county this rural, everyone’s connected,” Becky reflects. “In the worst times the county was like a huge web. The spider stirred and many linked strands vibrated.”

Above the Waterfall brings us into a remote world with contemporary concerns. The story of the crime is almost unnecessary; these characters are convincing and authentic without the scaffolding of plot. Becky, who writes poems about ponds, carp and dragonflies (she calls them "snake doctors"), is a little less present, a little too far away from the reader, but perhaps that's because the past dominates her present, and she is at a remove.

In interviews Rash often quotes Eudora Welty: “One place understood helps us understand all other places better.” In his poetry and fiction Rash always returns to the Appalachians. Immersing himself and his characters in a familiar setting allows him to focus on broader concerns, but this story is far from parochial.

Rash is a persuasive, revealing writer of exquisite sentences, even when portraying hollowed-out lives.

Sinéad Gleeson presents The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1