The Unquiet Earth

The Unquiet Earth is Denise Giardina's third novel. It was published in 1992 and won the W.D. Weatherford Award that year.

Plot summary
The Unquiet Earth is a novel written from the perspective of multiple narrators. The three main narrators are Dillon, Rachel, and Jackie who are all family. Dillon is Rachel's younger cousin, and Jackie is most likely their child.

The story begins prior to the birth of Jackie and is narrated by Dillon and Rachel, children living on their family land, the Homeplace. From the beginning, Dillon makes claims that he loves Rachel partially because she is the only one who has memories of his father. They both narrate parts of their childhood and the beginning of the novel mainly depicts how their relationship grows and how their love for one another begins. They are first cousins - therefore, their mothers are sisters. The first instance in which their love is really shown is when Rachel falls into a river and Dillon is forcibly restrained by his mother from diving in to save her because of her fear of losing him as well. He is forced to watch Rachel suffer and nearly be swept away by the current, but luckily she was dragged out by the mule she was riding. They rush her home, and Dillon watches through a window as his mother helps a cold and naked Rachel recover.

The story continues as they grow older and continue to fight for love. Rachel ends up leaving the Homeplace to attend a nursing school, where she spends several subsequent years. Dillon then, in what everyone believes is out of anger of Rachel leaving him, enlists in the British army to fight against Hitler. Upon Rachel's graduation from nursing school, she and her friend Tommie Justice enlist as nurses in the war as well. Rachel returns to find out that the Homeplace is no longer their land as Dillon had forewarned her many times. They are reunited at the number thirteen mine in Justice County where the remainder of the story takes place. Rachel continues working there as a county nurse, and Dillon works for the mine while avidly fighting for the union against the American Coal Company and Arthur Lee, who owns it. Arthur Lee is already an acquaintance of Rachel's because he dated her friend Tommie previously and introduced her to his friend Tony.

Rachel and Dillon continue to fight and disagree about their love for one another. Rachel is scared that they would be deemed illegitimate by society and tries to deny her love for her cousin. This offends and angers Dillon, who is against the social norms and wishes to love Rachel even if society believes it is the wrong thing to do. He wants to marry Rachel, but it is illegal to marry a first cousin. When the trouble with the coal company gets worse, Dillon asks that Rachel leave her job for the county, and help him in the fight against the coal companies as the other wives were doing. However, Dillon and Rachel were raised differently, and the words of her dying mother echoed in her head. She was raised by her mother to believe that men want a prim and proper lady, certainly not one who has sex before marriage. It would be wrong for kin to sleep with kin, and even more wrong for two first cousins to marry one another. Standing strong in these beliefs, Rachel ends up marrying Tony, an Italian man that Tommie and Arthur Lee set her up with. She has trouble having kids with Tony and continues to stay close to Dillon. Eventually, she gives into the fact that she loves Dillon and they make love in the secluded area of Trace Mountain where they conceive their daughter, Jackie. However, throughout the rest of the novel this escape to the mountain is kept quiet and Jackie believes until the very end that Tony is her father. After Rachel and Tony finally divorce due to an unhappy marriage and his escapes to the bar, Tony gets remarried and has trouble again having babies. Rachel fears that this will cause him suspicion of Jackie being his and that he will try to take her away.

Dillon's prior paranoia is justified at the end of the novel. The book closes with the breaking of the dawn above the towns, and eventually shows once again that the mining company's guarantee of safety was untrue. Jackie is left alone after the deaths of Tom and Dillon in the flood and moves away. The story closes with Jackie wanting to forget the place she called home. The book does a good job of creating a scene of mountain utopia that was slowly eroded away by the mining to an area that was undesirable and almost uninhabitable.

Buffalo Creek Flood
Buffalo Creek, which spans 17 miles, is located in a hollow of southern West Virginia's Logan County and consists of three branches. More than thirty years ago, it was the location of one of the deadliest floods in U.S. history, the Buffalo Creek flood. Due to neglectful and inattentive strip mining and heavy rain in the area, a powerful flood swept through the hollow, killing 125 men, women, and children, as well as injuring over 1,000 people.

Prior to the flood on February 26, 1972, mining officials of the area, who were concerned about the condition of the highest dam, measured the water levels every two hours the night before due to the continuous onslaught of heavy rain. Although mining company officials were notified of the increasing danger, the residents of the hollow were not informed. At 8:05 a.m., the dam collapsed and about 132 million gallons of black waste water rushed through the narrow Buffalo Creek hollow. On top of the 125 deaths and thousands of injuries that resulted, over 4,000 people were left homeless. The flood destroyed 943 homes, resulting in overall property damage estimated at $50 million.

On her website, Giardina says: “The Buffalo Creek ‘flood’ was the heart of my young adulthood. It is the heart of The Unquiet Earth.” She states that an early draft of the novel placed the flood in 1972, when the real flood occurred. However, because Giardina believed that the event was "too dramatic and destructive" to be placed in the middle of the story, she placed the flood at the end in order to balance the novel.