* The Scots-Irish in Appalachia* *By Alister McReynolds* *Scott Nicholson is a novelist and journalist who works on a weekly newspaper and lives in the town of Boone which nestles within the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. He's the author of best-selling Appalachian Gothic thrillers - The Harvest, The Manor and The Red Church. Scott Nicholson studied creative writing at the University of North Carolina and also at Appalachian State University.* In 2003 Scott Nicholson wrote an article about the friends and neighbours who helped to focus his thinking, his imagination and the cadences and rhythms of his style of writing. This journalistic piece was entitled "The Scots-Irish in Appalachia". In this article Nicholson notes that this particular group have had an influence in the Appalachian mountains particularly "on the culture that goes beyond kilts and bagpipes. "He quotes our own Billy Kennedy as an authority on the scale and causes of the Ulster-Scots phenomenal emigration and notes that, "a famine in Ireland around 1740," caused an emigration push. Famine is or course more often associated with the Southern Irish emigration experience yet it was a real enough factor for the Scots-Irish as was the fear of attack within the physical landscape of Ulster in the early 18th century. In common with other Appalachian/Scots Irish novelists and including here the work of Charles Frazier, whose blockbuster Cold Mountain was set in these same hills, this sense of threat in an otherwise bucolic and peaceful landscape is disturbingly pervasive. So in Nicholson's novel The Harvest - we see this typically described in the passage - "She turned into their driveway and pushed the nagging thought - sound from her mind. Happy, happy thoughts. The house was neat, cedar planked and stained clear, with redwood trim. No garage, but they had three bedrooms and two baths. An ordinary home where nothing bad could happen." As to the choice of the Appalachian Mountains as a heartland for the Ulster folk, Nicholson quotes the distaste of the immigrants for English colonial government and notes that the sparsely - settled Southern Appalachians served their purposes well. However, he points to something at once more fanciful and in every sense deeper when he observes that "some geologic evidence suggests that Appalachia is part of an ancient mountain chain that runs through the Northern United Kingdom". Personally I've never been very sure about this kind of fatalistic coincidence and tend to believe on a more pragmatic level in the 'push and pullforces' of the particular time as having had more significant impact. Scott Nicholson goes on to characterize the stereotypical Ulster-Scot as having "a rather severe and stubborn reputation" and adds that, "church and education were heavily entwined". He observes that this provides the basis for the Baptist and Methodist faiths of today although he adds a rider that they also brought a "talent for making corn whiskey to go along with their distaste for government, which lives on in the unfortunate stereotype of the paranoid hillbilly". In The Harvest Nicholson treats this latter type with humour when he contrasts them with the people that he mixed with at the University of North Carolina - "there people gathered in coffee houses and bars and discussed Sartre and Pollock, Camus and Marxism. Here they drink liquor from Dixie cups in the Moose Lodge parking lot and talk about Hubcaps". One senses that Nicholson feels that the latter group are in many ways more real than the coffee house chattering class types. As with Charles Frazier, Nicholson sees music as being a major influence being with the fiddle and the imported lilting Appalachian style of playing which has its foundation in the Irish and Scottish reels.If you enjoy that kind of psycho-thriller novel then as an Ulster-Scot you might find that you have considerable empathy and that there is much that you relate to in the world of Scott Nicholson's novels. On another level as sheer escapism they're pretty enjoyable!