Body Grow Cold

Timothy Quinn's "Body Grow Cold" is a dialogue-only novella about responsibility and failure among a group of coal miners turned small-time drug dealers in a small southern Illinois town. A shooting lures eight men and two women into an abandoned shaft mine where they dissemble into savagery and despair when a power failure leaves them trapped 1,000 feet underground. The novella is loosely influenced by the Herrin massacre of 1922 in Williamson County, Illinois, during which twenty-two mine workers were killed in a rampage following the re-opening of a unionized mine by the Southern Illinois Coal Company.