Once upon a time, just after slavery but long before democracy, the Sand Mountain Hermit lived and died alone, just a couple of counties north of where I sit typing today. Marx Edgeworth Lazarus was his real name. I know nothing about his activities as a hermit: Hermits by definition do most of their activities away from the eyes of history. Before the War, though, he was a doctor, and a philosopher, and that rarest of things: an anarchist in the antebellum South.

I’ll keep the story short. Born in North Carolina in 1822, M. E. Lazarus grew into the type of intellectual you’d expect to find not in the South but in New England: someone convinced of the perfectibility of man and society. Troubled by the wet dreams that plagued him into adulthood, Lazarus wrote a book on his theories about how to stop nocturnal emissions. In a later work, he railed against marriage as an institution that enslaves women. As a sort of footnote to those texts, Lazarus, in his thirties, married a nineteen-year-old woman.

He also became an advocate of the phalanstery—a proposed commune in which hundreds of people would live under one roof, practicing free love and sharing all their property. The phalanstery never quite caught on in the North, but Southern anarchists such as Lazarus were eager to find slaveholders willing to convert their plantations into multiracial communist utopias. Lazarus never did find a taker for that proposal. After serving in the Civil War as a Confederate surgeon, he retired from society, living in the Appalachian foothills of Alabama.

This is a true story. So is the story of Ches McCartney, a more sociable but still hermit-like figure known popularly as the Alabama Goat Man. As the name suggests, McCartney traveled across the Southeast in a goat-drawn wagon, in a time when others drove Chevys and lived in air conditioning. People all over Alabama know about the Goat Man, and portraits of him hang in the homes of some Alabama intellectuals. Few, though, know that Ches McCartney ran away from home as a teenager to marry a circus knife thrower. Few know that he drove his goats across the country to L.A., with a plan to court and marry Morgan Fairchild.

Hermits are supposed to be simple; that’s their appeal. And yet they are human, and therefore irreducible. To dig into a hermit’s story is to find a mass of biographical wires and philosophical vines—deep meanings and long storylines balled together like clumps of hair. Alabama writer Gregory Ariail seems to be aware of this. In his brilliant short story, “All Hermits Died on Thursday,” Ariail uses magical realism to give us the hermit’s complexity in shorthand. The story consists of short obituaries of Appalachian hermits who choke to death on their own long beards, who levitate even as corpses, or who possess books of astronomical knowledge far beyond the science of their day. One leaves a suicide note: “I’ll ride the moon all the way down to hell to meet my mother and Mr. Price, my Latin teacher.” To tell too much more of this story is to spoil it for the reader, and yet to tell too little is to fail to do justice to the breathtaking inventiveness of Airial’s creations. You can get a spoiler-free taste of the flavor of Ariail’s hermit tales from this short film he posted to YouTube.

The hermit obituaries form the title story of Hermits Die on Thursday: Stories of Appalachia and the Dark Ages, Ariail’s most recent short story collection. Half of these stories, as the title suggests, are set in Appalachia, and Ariail’s treatment does for the entire region what the title story does for hermits.

Every story presents isolated rural hill people with riddles which defy logic, revealing that things are always more complex and interconnected than they seem. You thought you knew what this thing was, each story says, but you didn’t know anything, really. Why would a hermit, even in the hills of Appalachia, not have a Latin teacher? Why couldn’t mushrooms, left to grow on unseen hillsides, form into a shape resembling Queen Elizabeth, and why wouldn’t we revere such an agglomeration if it grew?

I first heard Airial’s hermit tales at a reading by the author in my hometown in northern Alabama. I was struck by Ariail’s description of his journey to this type of writing. He told us how he grew up in North Carolina as a fantasy fan, but discovered the mountains as an artistic subject only after venturing into nature to make fan films. His story brought back memories of my own childhood, in the hills with Star Wars figures, realizing over time that a landscape doesn’t have to be Endor to be interesting.

I don’t doubt that Appalachia is full of nerds who’ve experienced this same transition from fantasy to regional writing—though most get drawn into writing about the sociology of mountain people or the troubled history of the region. Ariail goes in a different direction, with a focus on the forest and mountains themselves, still vast and untamed. His landscape consists of the wooded hills that most residents of the region see only from the highway. The moon and sun became gods because early humans could always see them but could never touch them. Ariail convinces us that if one touches the mountains, one will enter the spirit world.

To most, the name Appalachia evokes images of poverty. Poverty is the condition of not having enough, and it can be a good lens through which to look at the deepest questions of human nature. In Ariail’s Appalahia, there are not enough people to tame the landscape. There is not enough logic to explain the events of the world. Not enough God to bring justice. But the universe has feet that stick out of this too-short blanket of rationality and civilization. Ariail’s characters always encounter some frightening magic, in the way one sometimes encounters the odd natural flora and fauna of Appalachia, if one looks. I’ve lived in the southern Appalachians on and off for half a century, but I was nearly fifty the first time I encountered a moth the size of a slice of pizza or woke up to find a mass of ladybugs gathered in the corner of my living room. Only later did I learn that these are hill-country things. Imagine instead waking up to find your chickens all now have tiny humanlike heads with beards, and you get a grasp of the nature of surprise in Ariail’s world.

The second half of Airial’s book is devoted to fantasy and magical realism set in the Europe of the Dark Ages, but if the section weren’t so labeled, you’d hardly notice the transition. There are still hermits and demon-like figures living close by a treacherous natural world, but now we hear also of kings and fjords and glaciers. Slowly, Ariail introduces themes and settings that place us on more familiar genre ground. A few of the stories read like standard, if impeccably written, epic fantasy. Readers will find the ragged magic of these stories all the more luminous after passing through the portal of weird Appalachia. Whether you read to gain insights on your own life or to be transported to another, this book is worth your time.