"America's coal industry remains a laboratory test for 'free market' capitalism and government's efforts to control it. The people who live in its midst, as captured here in words and pictures by Ken and Melanie Light, are obstinate, wounded, witty, profane, and defiantly human."--John Sayles, Independent Filmmaker

Gary Hollow is a social and mining history of what was at one time the largest coal operation in the world. Gary Hollow is located in McDowell County West Virginia. The book takes the reader from the time Shawnee Indians were taking captives down the Tug Fork River (1750) until United States Steel closed its mines in 1986. The book covers how the coal company's built the mines, schools, medical facilities, houses, roads, recreation facilities and other parts of the communities. It also discusses the roles immigrants had in developing the social community.

We walk on fire or air, so Daddy liked to say. Basement floors too hot to touch. Steaming green lawns in the dead of winter. Sinkholes, quick and sudden, plunging open at your feet. The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced eleven-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft. In the aftermath, decades-old secrets threaten to prove just as dangerous to the Howleys as the burning, hollow ground beneath their feet. Inspired by real-life events in Centralia and Carbondale, where devastating coal mine fires irrevocably changed the lives of residents, The Hollow Ground is an extraordinary debut with an atmospheric, voice-driven narrative and an indelible sense of place. Lovers of literary fiction will find in Harnett's young, determined protagonist a character as heartbreakingly captivating as any in contemporary literature.