Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.

One morning in 2011, Jason Mott walked into his kitchen and found his mother sitting at the table. Mott was surprised to see her, even though they were in his childhood home in rural Columbus County. He sat down across from her, and she began asking him about his life.

Mott told his mother that about a decade before, he’d left a manufacturing job to attend community college before earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. After graduation, he wrote a novel per year. He’d begin a new one every spring, work on it through the summer and fall, and edit it in the winter before submitting it to prospective agents. So far, he hadn’t had any luck getting a book published.

But now, after this visit from his mother, Mott had a new idea: What would happen if the dead suddenly began returning to their families as if they’d never left? After all, that’s what his mother had done. By the time the two of them sat down together, she had been dead for a decade. Their meeting took place one night in a dream.

Two years later, Mott published The Returned, a novel about deceased people who mysteriously reappear across the globe. It was an instant New York Times bestseller, received rave reviews from booksellers and readers, and in 2013 was adapted for television. It ran for two seasons as Resurrection on ABC.

When he sold The Returned, Mott was holding down an office job at a major telecommunications company and writing during his time off.

“I worked 40 hours a week,” he says of his corporate job. “I wrote basically 25 to 30 or sometimes 40 hours a week. So I had no life outside of those two things. It was a very tough period of time that paid off, you could argue, but it definitely cost me some things, too.”

photograph by Andrea Cheung

Mott’s frenetic pace continued after his debut. He went on to publish three more novels in less than eight years: The Wonder of All Things in 2014, The Crossing in 2018, and Hell of a Book, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2021, vaulting him to the upper tiers of American literature. A sequel to Hell of a Book — a hilarious yet heartbreaking novel about an author on a book tour who’s haunted by the specter of racial violence — is forthcoming this summer under the title People Like Us.

In addition to gorgeous language and powerful storytelling, Mott’s books share two similarities: brushes with the supernatural that explore themes of race and class, and a duty to accurately portray the complexities of rural life.

“I grew up watching reruns of The Twilight Zone,” he says. “For a while, I tried to take a more grounded, realistic approach to storytelling, and I found it just wasn’t for me. But those more supernatural elements are a kind of workaround to get at the ideas I want to talk about.”

As for writing about rural spaces, Mott — who still lives in eastern North Carolina — feels that this way of life is often grossly misrepresented in most forms of media.

“What North Carolina is and what the South is to me, I’ve never quite found represented in the ways that I wanted to represent it,” he says. “And that’s the lesson of writing: If you don’t find it out there, then you’ve got to create it yourself.”

Searching Souls

photograph by Matt Hulsman

Jason Mott’s debut novel, The Returned, opens with an elderly couple named Harold and Lucille Hargrave as they receive the shock of a lifetime: Their son, Jacob, who died decades earlier at the age of 8, is standing on their front porch as if no time has passed at all.

The Hargraves aren’t alone. The dead are returning across the globe, and soon, a government bureau opens to help reunite them with their families. But what some see as a miracle, others view as a threat. When a heavily patrolled camp for the returned opens in the Hargraves’ hometown of Arcadia, North Carolina, the family finds itself at the center of a global phenomenon that will change the living and the dead forever.

Mott’s novel is delicately written yet driven by a breakneck narrative propulsion. It asks hard questions about what we would do if we were to see our deceased loved ones walk this earth again.

More to Explore: Hear Jason Mott in new episodes out March 4 and 18. Listen at ourstate.com/book-club-podcasts.