Hermits Die on Thursday: Stories of Appalachia and the Dark Ages
(forthcoming from Mercer University Press in September 2025)
In this collection of short stories, transgression is the rule, and the profane and the sacred share a bed. Follow hermits and solitary wanderers as they encounter the weird in the Appalachian Mountains and wild spaces of medieval England and Iceland. Prepare for an unsettling procession of entities and objects: a queen turned to fungus, a hermit with a waterfall-sized beard, a goat’s head growing from a cliff, a devilish Pied Piper, a god trapped inside a glacier, a gnome on the moon, bog bodies clinging obstinately to an iron age monument, and an ancient cloud worshipped deep underground, among many others. These tales will transport you to the frontiers of the imagination.
From Appalachia to medieval England, clear across the North Atlantic to Iceland, Gregory Ariail’s Hermits Die on Thursday: Stories of Appalachia and the Dark Ages explores solitude and mysticism. Gleaming brilliantly at its surrealist edges, Ariail’s short story collection stupefies and delights, reimagining the hermit myth, turning it upside down, and making it his own.
Robert Gwaltney (Author of The Cicada Tree)
Early Praise
These stories feel like they were found on the underside of a rock that’s probably never been moved in a remote part of the world, the old world, the world underneath our own that we forgot the name of a hundred years ago. I approach them with caution, myself. They changed me. Read them slowly and at your own risk.
Ander Monson (Author of The Gnome Stories)
There is a cold clarity to the world of Hermits Die on Thursday, as if each story were etched into a slab of mountain quartz and left to hum under moonlight. At times Gregory Ariail’s characters – plague saints, fungus queens – emerge familiarly from Appalachia. At other times they seem to rise up from the old, slow-ticking cosmos where grief is currency and time runs crooked. These stories bend genre and undo history, tilting the reader into surreal terrains where a goat might fuse with a cliffside or a plague might carry not death, but mercy. These stories are funny. They’re also reverent – toward the land, the body, and the stubborn human hope that persists in the face of silence. Ariail has written a book that feels ancient and freshly struck all at once.
Grey Wolfe LaJoie (Author of Little Ones)
About Gregory Ariail
I'm an Assistant Professor at the University of West Alabama. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, a master's degree from Oxford University, and an MFA from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. In 2019, I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail.