Book Reviews
Michael Dittman on Seldom Seen: A Miner’s Tale by Mitch James Catamount Press 2023.
by Mike Dittman

The descent into the underground is one of humanity’s oldest stories. The archetype attempts to explain the order of the universe and what happens when that order is turned on its head. The underworld is the dark abode of the dead and those who make the journey. If they can return, they come back changed. To that point, Mitch James’ debut novel, Seldom Seen, begins with the discovery of a desiccated body in a mine, and the plot never slows after that.
Brander, the protagonist, returns to his derelict Illinois hometown after years in the Alaskan bush working as a trapper to find his mother dead. On his way back from drowning his grief in a local bar, Brander is accosted in an alley by Richter, an Ancient Mariner-like figure. The man insists that Brander go to Seldom Seen, a mine in Patton, Pennsylvania, to find all of the answers that the young man seeks. Brander does so only to lose his bearings and possibly his sanity below the horizon of the world.
At Seldom Seen, Brander becomes friends with the ironically named Lucky, a rough veteran miner who trains him. Lucky’s wife has asked him to move out while, at the same time, he struggles to support his brother, Cane. Cane’s quick spiral from sobriety back to drug addiction provides the showpiece of the book – a raid on a meth lab by Brander and Lucky which sends Brander himself spiraling into a place both emotionally and physically from which there seems no return.
After the tragedy of the battle, Brander finds himself drawn deeper into the mine, following the reappearance of the long-dead miner, Richter, who works as both a figure of help and damage. Brander becomes a spectator to his own life, drawn into a play over which he cannot control, pushed through torments without a single pleasure for the amusement of some unnamable force.
Seldom Seen is a real mine, located in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, now abandoned and considered by local folklore to be haunted. James’ Seldom Seen is one of the biggest underground mines in the world and the biggest in the US. The mine is unusually rich with quality coal and a character itself in the book as are the huge machines that move apace through the dark splintering earth and rock and spitting it out. James’ writing preys on the strangeness of mining, to both the reader and Brander, to layer in a touch of Lovecraft’s weird – the horror of the unknowable or incomprehensible. The mine and the machinery exist alongside the men but are heartless and, although part of the world, not of the world. Beyond the comprehension or control of the men working it, this place and these tools have no regard for lives, loves, or tragedies. The mine is special, readers are reminded again and again, but that specialness is because it simply has no regard or recognition of the human world.
Although the novel’s setting, Patton Pennsylvania, is a real place, James creates a fun-house mirror of the locale to continue to set the audience ill-at-ease. Like the mine itself, the story exists outside of time and place. James uses local details and a vague timeline to reinforce the idea that something is not quite right. Lucky’s daughter has a smartphone, but the character’s vehicles are decades old. The brick factory where Lucky’s brother works is real but closed in 1968. Patton can be found just off I-80 we’re told, but characters drink Lion’s Head beer from Wilkes Barre while rooting for the Steelers in a Pittsburgh accent. The setting seems to be both familiar and strange as James works to create a mythical Appalachia, familiar, yet not quite right to further ratchet up the feeling of unease and strangeness. It’s an uncanny valley of Appalachia if you will: an uncanny holler.
James writes tough masculine prose bereft of flourishes. He has a cinematic style. His scenes play out in a way that the reader can visualize film cuts moving back and forth during scenes of dialogue. His chapters are short and punchy and the action and violence spin with a ruthless intensity.
Seldom Seen is a plot-driven narrative rather than character-driven sometimes to a fault. Most of the characters would have benefited from just a little more fleshing out, a little more back story to fully invest the readers in their lives and to make the horrific events of the book have a deeper emotional impact. The pace of the novel is so fast that catching one’s breath or feeling suspense is diluted.
However, that price of admission is well worth the ride. As Major, the mine foreman tells Brander after he’s hired. “I promise you, you ain’t even imagined the kinds of things you’re going to see.” Seldom Seen is too complex a book to be placed into a pigeonhole of a supernatural story. The mine is haunted in the same way that Brander is haunted, in the way that we are all haunted, by failure, by success, by happiness that seems just ahead, around the corner in the dark mineshaft of existence down which we fumble.

Michael Dittman lives and writes near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania surrounded by the palimpsest of the Appalachian Rust Belt and its ghosts. He’s worked at bike shops, in newsrooms, and on top of roofs, but today he can be found more often at the front of a classroom. He is the author of Jack Kerouac; A Biography, Small Brutal Incidents, and Who Holds the Devil. His short stories and poetry, as well as his journalism and non-fiction, are widely published. Contact him at www.Michaeldittman.com.