In a span of minutes, the lives of four members of Brickton Community College change forever when an active shooter enters the campus and opens fire. Running on adrenaline and fear, the group—a crew of students and their teacher—subdues the perpetrator in a violent frenzy that leads to the man's death. Reeling from the shock of their collective actions, the group is thrown into turmoil when they realize that the person they have killed is someone they all knew.

​

Narrated in alternating voices and set against the backdrop of an economically depressed Appalachian town, Laura Leigh Morris's The Stone Catchers explores the immeasurable pain and loss felt by the survivors of a school shooting. Forced to process the horror of the event, mourn, and to reconcile themselves to their newfound recognition as local heroes, the survivors grapple with the losses suffered by their community and their own actions. In the process they come face to face with the unquantifiable cost gun violence takes on not only the survivors, but the families, friends, and futures of a community fractured by tragedy.

​

​

Praise for The Stone Catchers

​

Laura Leigh Morris pulls her readers deep into a community experiencing generational tragedy and with eagle-eyed attention to the fine grain of human foible and capacity, charts the path through the tempest. In a world where on a daily basis we see our humanity reduced and our storytelling pinched, The Stone Catchers is a precious gift. Morris has given us a compelling, addictive narrative, shot through with a compassion validated by her unflinching gaze and measured, magisterial prose. The Stone Catchers is a marvel. Morris takes one of the toughest subjects to contemplate—a mass shooting—and in lucid prose limns how all of us are beset by pressure that results in questionable decisions. Morris unpacks what it is to be human, her deadly accuracy matched by her consummate delicacy. ~Robert Gipe, author of Pop: An Illustrated Novel

​

In The Stone Catchers, Laura Leigh Morris does the thing most Americans refuse to do: She stays with the victims of gun violence long after the twenty-four-hour news cycle has ended. She shows us how the trauma of a school shooting reverberates through a community—not just for the victims themselves, but for all those who feel the effects of their trauma. She does not let us do the thing we most want to do, what we do again and again, which is look away. She demands that we look. That we reckon. That we implicate ourselves in the violence that plays out far too often in our country. ~Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place

​

Laura Leigh Morris's THE STONE CATCHERS gloriously complicates the narrative of a school shooting. When an unarmed professor and three of her students save countless lives by killing the attacker, nothing in the tale that follows is a consolation—not the heroes' consciences, nor their status as heroes. As the shooting's aftershocks continue to ripple through their lives, it breaks loose all the terrible inertias already in place: the professor's waning marriage, her students' family struggles, and the ambitions thwarted by early pregnancy. Morris writes with a relentless commitment to Donnetta, Miller, Charlie, and Priscilla and to the specifics of this small Appalachian town. She asks what a shared act means to its separate actors, an exploration that makes THE STONE CATCHERS an enthralling, unflinching, refreshingly unsentimental read. ~Sarah Cypher, author of The Skin and Its Girl

​

​​