“Matthew Neill Null’s Floodgate is a masterpiece and a saga, a novel of torrent, flood control, and the fifty years before and after the mighty Summersville Dam flooded parts of five counties, erasing histories and species under thousands of acres of water. The dam's gargantuan lake saved the polluting, industrial businesses downriver and spawned a white-water rafting tourist mecca, but Floodgate tells the truth inside the sinewy lie of history. Read Floodgate for Null’s gorgeous, flint-hard, shining language, and for the lost worlds—villages and mining camps bulldozed and drowned; freshwater creeks whose native mussels (Rabbitsfoot, Pink Mucket, Pondhorn) die first; legions of giant oaks become treetop islands whose perched, isolate birds watch the water; hundreds of graves torn up and moved. No wonder the souls set free still shush and sigh in the waters, I’m with you. All us, we're with you. Floodgate is unforgettable, exhilarating, terrifying.”—Jayne Anne Phillips, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Night Watch

“A lushly rendered, politically radical novel that illuminates not only the American past, but also our present. Floodgate is a historical novel with harrowing contemporary stakes. I loved it.”—Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot and editor of McSweeney’s

“With Floodgate Matthew Neill Null continues his artful, now monumental, consideration of the American empire run amok and the grievous consequences for its own land, its own ideals, its own citizens. From the particular vantage of West Virginia and its working people, Null choreographs the machinery and distills the human costs of ‘Power held at bay. Power at rest. Power unleashed’ into a stark lamentation of injustice and a moving, lyric hymn honoring those who struggle to endure it.”
—Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers

“The extraordinary work of Matthew Neill Null stands out not only for its intelligence but for the sincerity of its humanist concerns for people and the land itself. Floodgate refuses sentimentality in showing us the personal tolls in the collision of community and government, the dignity of labor and the backbreaking toll on our bodies. Here is a wise writer indeed, one who deeply understands how history can subsume and even drown out the individual story, the terrible costs we bear by not knowing how we have arrived to our present time.”—Manuel Muñoz, MacArthur Fellow and author of The Consequences

A former West Virginia coal miner encounters corruption and cultural upheaval working on a dam project that will submerge his town.

In the remote corner of West Virginia in the 1960s, former coal miner Lance Drennen takes a job as an overseer for the construction of an immense flood-control dam, which will drown 2800 acres of land that have been in his and other local families for generations. When Lance witnesses a terrible accident and discovers irregularities on the site that are guaranteed to line the pockets of the company and the local government, he must decide whether or not he will become a whistle-blower.

With incredible eloquence and clarity, Matthew Neill Null sets in motion the characters who will tug at either end of Lance’s life: his wife, Johnny, the adoring daughter of a hell-raising radical coal miner, who has withdrawn into her own world, and Jim Koss, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Koss is the only person who can draw Johnny out, and he becomes Lance’s confidante. But Koss has a secret history: he had been fired from the Washington agency designing the dam because of his communist sympathies.

In a most concrete and riveting narrative, Floodgate explores the social and economic upheavals of the era—labor unrest, political and corporate corruption, persecution of communists, the devastation of the environment—and their powerful impact on powerless communities. It is a story of loyalty to family and community, moral responsibility for personal choices, corporate greed and environmental destruction, and the depths and limits of love.