Local author E. Davis Enloe’s first novel explores friendship and family
The summer of 1961 in Gilkey, a small town in the Appalachian hills of Rutherford County, North Carolina, is full of rough edges for Boyd Cash.
The 12-year-old protagonist of Into the Night Woods, the debut novel of Greenville writer E. Davis Enloe, starts off the season by being sent off to live on his grandfather’s farm, punishment for a schoolyard fight. He dreams of striking out on an adventure with his best friend, Roger, to find an abandoned railroad trestle and a legendary cave.
To do so, Boyd must overcome threats from Roger’s violent, alcoholic father and a corrupt sheriff, not to mention the cougar rumored to be prowling the surrounding woods. He’s forced to lie, steal, and risk everything to protect his friend.
“I really wanted to write a story about two boys’ friendship,” Enloe says. “And I wanted to thrust them into an adult world that they don’t have the skills or experience to navigate. I needed a protagonist that could handle that, who was hard-headed and stubborn and driven. He had to be compelling and strong and a little crazy at times.”
Enloe knows that setting well. He’s from there.
“If you go out of Rutherfordton on 221 for about three or four miles toward Marion, there’s a crossroads there, and Parton’s Lumberyard on the right,” Enloe says. “That’s where I was born. I wanted to have a setting in this first novel that I was intimately familiar with.”
E. Davis Enloe’s inspiration
After a lifetime of writing “in my head,” Enloe started getting it down on paper 20 years ago when he retired from the South Carolina Army National Guard at 55. Around the same time, while surfing Match.com, he started chatting with another local creative force: Mimi Wyche, celebrated visual artist and former Broadway actor and singer. Three years later, they were married.
“At first I was like, ‘I don’t know what it’s going to be like to live with a woman who’s smarter than you about most things,” Enloe says now. “And it turned out it’s wonderful. We’re both very creative, but our interests don’t overlap.”
After reading some of Enloe’s early work, Wyche encouraged him to pursue an MFA at Converse University in Spartanburg, where he studied under poet and fiction writer R.T. Smith, editor of the literary journal Shenandoah. After Converse, Enloe continued working with Smith on his poetry, placing pieces in prestigious journals and branching out into short fiction.
Enloe dedicated Into the Night Woods to Smith, who died in 2024. Along the way, he also studied under celebrated writers like Stuart O’Nan and Lee K. Abbott. He envisioned his debut novel as another short story until a workshop with Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog, who encouraged him to expand it.
Doing that left room for the author to weave in more “abiding images”–family, church, the lumberyard, an old country store, even the rumored cougar–from his own childhood while delving into morally complex social issues like race and religion.
Into the Night Woods is not your typical coming-of-age story, says Enloe, despite the transition its hero goes through.
“Instead of being six months older at the end of the story, he’s probably 10 years older emotionally,” he says. “He’s less naive and more aware of his own limitations and the limitations of people and institutions around him.”
Enloe calculates he’s about one year away from finishing his second novel, even as he anticipates the arrival of Into the Night Woods in stores.
“I’ll be 72 when the book launches,” he says. “And my first line is going to be, ‘I’m 72 years old, and I’ve already written one book.’”
The Title
Enloe says the novel’s title comes from a line about the boys seeing a cougar appear at the mouth of a cave and then disappearing “into the night woods.” His mentor, Lee K. Abbot, taught him that titles shouldn’t start with A or The if possible, and the best ones come “straight from the story’s imagery.”
Find out more at edavisenloe.com
