Published: February 04, 2008 09:12 pm      

Homer Hickam book out today

In Homer Hickam’s 10th book, he returns to his roots, the southern West Virginia coalfields, with a romantic mystery.

Hickam provides readers with a clash of cultures on many levels in “Red Helmet,” which hits book stores today.

Set in the fictional town of Highcoal, Hickam takes the reader through an intense course in modern coal mining methods as the book’s heroine, Song Hawkins, becomes a “red hat” at her estranged husband’s mine in Highcoal.

While novice coal miners are known in the industry as “red hats,” Hickam said he didn’t believe the term would translate to an international audience — thus he used “red helmet.”

Cable Jordan, the mine’s superintendent and Song’s new husband, is embattled with corporate managers who are interested only in the bottom line.

Song is a rich, big city girl compared to working-class Cable, who loves his small town. Her deceased mother is Chinese, while her father is American, Hickam notes.

“It really doesn’t matter, because Song knows little about her mother’s home country and she is thoroughly New York in her attitudes and thinking,” Hickam said of his heroine. “But, quite honestly, why I layered one more cultural difference on her I don’t know, except I just saw her that way. I also thought her West Virginia husband would be intrigued by such an exotic, beautiful, and very different woman.”

While Cable fights for safer equipment and better conditions for his miners, he faces a continuing, and mysterious, decrease in the mine’s production of high quality coal, which places his job on the corporate chopping block.

Additionally, he is confused by his wife’s preference to continue living in her beloved New York City, though he is unwilling to break his own ties with Highcoal.

In the meantime, Song hates the mountains — which cause her to upchuck whenever she travels the snaking roads — the lack of designer labels and cosmetics at the single local store, and the seemingly judgmental, continually gossiping townspeople.

Things become even more complicated when Song’s father, the mega-rich Joe Hawkins, buys the mine where Cable is employed without letting Song know beforehand.

The story also delves into the illegal drugs now plaguing the southern coalfields.

Will there be a sequel?

“Maybe,” Hickam said. “I like writing about the people of the West Virginia coalfields.”

He has also penned the notes for Kathy Mattea’s new CD, “Coal,” a tribute to her own coalfield roots as well as the men — past and present — who labor in the bowels of the earth to provide electricity.

“Although we may travel afar, we who grew up in West Virginia can never really leave that old place where miners yet walk with a trudging grace to and from the mines, and where preachers still preach in snowy white churches built on hillside cuts, and God, who we have no doubt is also a West Virginian, still does His work, too...,” Hickam writes in those notes.

The CD will be in stores in April.

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Hickam followed his international best-seller “Rocket Boys: A Memoir” with “The Coalwood Way,” which also went to the top of the best-seller lists, and the third and final book in the trilogy was “Sky of Stone.” All were set in McDowell County’s Coalwood, where he grew up.

Hickam has worked in the coal mines, served in Vietnam, is a retired NASA engineer, a retired scuba diving instructor and an amateur paleontologist.

He and his wife, Linda Terry Hickam, have homes in Alabama and the Virgin Islands.

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Hickam will be at Tamarack in Beckley, Friday, Feb. 29, at 1 p.m. and at Hearthside Books in Bluefield at 5 p.m. to autograph books.

On Saturday, March 1, he will be in Huntington at Empire Books at 1 p.m. and in Charleston at Taylor Books at 6 p.m.