Dengman Gap by Tony Irons

I wrote very favorably about Tony Irons’ first novel, Hoover’s Children, and commented that I was eager for his second book. Irons has now released Dengman Gap, and this book does not disappoint. The story takes place during 1969 in the Blueridge Mountains which span North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee.

Jeremiah Dixon (J.D.) had the choice of going to any of the Ivy League schools, but he chose to attend the Appalachian School of Forestry, which was only three miles from home. He said it was the best school about forestry in the country, and he wanted to know more about trees. As his college graduation neared, he suddenly had some unexpected free days and in a state of emotional upset (well explained by the author), he headed for Dengman Gap where he heard there was good deer hunting. It’s not that J.D. was hot to kill something. He just wanted to spend some time in the woods and get his thoughts in order. On his way there, he encountered the interesting and pretty 20-year-old Abby and her charge Billy Talikonoge, a boy who was mute and seemingly moronic. Critical to the story was J.D.’s encounter with the Old Man, a wise old hermit who had been monitoring mysterious happenings in a remote, abandoned and forbidden Indian Reservation.

This was a conspiracy story about nuclear and biologic waste that was being stored unsafely on Indian grounds by a multinational chemical company that had been contracting with the U.S. military since WWI. J.D.’s mom, Amanda Dixon was a Ph.D. and research scientist at the nearby medical school, and the old man was a nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Granny Mae was a 92-year-old uneducated songstress. Junior was J.D.’s high school buddy, a truck mechanic, and Marie was the 16-year-old girl Junior got pregnant and married. Uncle Albert was a hog farmer. Sisters Valentine and Francine ran an orphanage in Lubbock, Texas. Irons took this unlikely crew of people and showed his gift for character development, dialogue, and descriptions of the local culture. Even though I could anticipate where the plot was headed, this was a thoroughly enjoyable novel from a part of the country where I have travelled too little. Now, once again, I’m eager to read Irons’ next novel.

Hoover's Children

In what is far more than a crime novel, Tony Irons briefly traces the wild gene in two of his three main characters, siblings Sean and Gwyneth O’Neal to 120 years earlier when ancestor Mary Donnegad O’Neal, a new Irish immigrant, decided to have sex with a Cherokee Indian, starting a group that came to be known as the Black Irish. That rebellious trait was passed from generation to generation until the mid 1960s when the country was struggling with the war in Vietnam and significant social upheaval. Through remarkable twists of misfortune, the O’Neal siblings were manipulated by the FBI into joining the hunt for a list of people that the underground Weatherman were recruiting for their own anti-government activities. Behind the intrigue was J. Edgar Hoover, therefore the title, “Hoover’s Children.” Sean became a Special Forces guy in Vietnam and then an enforcer for the mob in Boston. When his sister was raped, he extracted the ultimate revenge against her assailant. That was the murder that allowed Hoover to demand certain misdeeds from both Sean and Gwyneth. Also brought into the story was Jack Duncan, younger brother of Dwight who was serving time in prison for his idealistic resistance to the Vietnam War. Dwight and Jack were both brilliant students who spent a lot of time writing poetry, revealing a charisma that drew others to resistance against the war. Hoover knew that Dwight, with contacts to the Black Panthers in prison, was making brother Jack the unwitting courier of the list which Hoover wanted to get at all costs.

As the plot unfolded, Irons skillfully took us through Israel, Algeria, Morocco, and Turkey. He captured the drug, flower power and self-important intellectual culture of the era while spinning great plot twists that I didn’t see coming.

Author Tony Irons is a very interesting guy, and some of this story is autobiographical. He dropped out of college, became a carpenter, taught himself architecture, and was recognized by Mayor Willie Brown in 2000 as City Architect of San Francisco. It was only after a stint at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard that Irons turned to creative writing and produced this book, his debut novel. This novel was recommended to be by a guy in Todos Santos, Baja Sur, Mexico where I have been spending some time, and Tony Irons wrote in the acknowledgements section of his book that there’s a Todos Santos writers’ group. If this book gives a hint into the quality of writing that will come from this group, or even if it just the beginning of a series of books from Irons, we have a lot to look forward to.