For this reason and others, I choose to view that period of the 1990s as the time when the people of the generation I am counted among felt themselves most fully alive. And Willie Mann’s Uncle’s House enjoyed a paramount role in that experience, coming to possesses us all after a fashion, though what particular brand of fascination or madness unwound our brains I am still at a loss to say. It almost seemed as though that house, as if conscious of its strange power, had demanded of each of us a conquering despot’s fealty, an exorbitant price, that each of us eventually would be obliged to pay—sooner or later. Even me.

It is my belief, too, that Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House had, through its fueling of our lives, in some way come also to determine them, for when I had looked back at the house that final time, silent and inscrutable in its shroud of darkness, I had felt a connection with it—a vague feeling that my own usefulness was just beginning even as its had only just been used up. But then a deep and powerful yearning had taken hold of me when the house had released me and I struck out down the road again—a hope that in coming to be used up myself I might, in the process, discover some manner by which to recall and memorialize that pulse of savage exhilarating youthful life, of as many passionate lives, as that house had.

Casey Clabough is the author of the travel memoir, The Warrior’s Path: Reflections Along an Ancient Route, as well as four scholarly books about contemporary writers. He serves as editor of the literature section of Encyclopedia Virginia and as general editor of the James Dickey Review. His first novel, Confederado, will appear in 2012, as will his fifth scholarly book, Inhabiting Contemporary Southern & Appalachian Literature: Region & Place in the 21st Century.