Here, Currey masterfully demonstrates the way a writer can build suspense by piling up small details, one after the other. This passage comes from a story in Currey's short story collection, The Wars of Heaven, set during the West Virginia Mine Wars. A coal miner is speaking. He had helped beat up two of Baldwin Felts' mine guards. He knows they'll come after him to get revenge, so he sends his wife and kids out of town to their relatives. Then he waits:

"I came back into Red Jacket three days later, thinking our house would be gone, burned out or vandalized. It was our own home, land that had been in my mother's family, outside town limits, and it was there, still standing pretty as you please, that old coat of ivory paint peeling black under years of coal soot. They had been there, somebody had: the front door stood open. It had rained in: dead leaves blew straight into the parlor. I went through every room, every closet, cupboard, shelf. I looked under beds and up the chimney until I was satisfied nobody was waiting for me. By then, it was dark, and I turned on all the lights downstairs, drew the curtains to give the place a warm and homey look from the road. I locked the front and back doors and all the windows and took the shotgun from the hall closet corner. Upstairs, I pulled off my boots and socks, loaded the gun with two shells full of number two buckshot and sat in my bedroom in the dark, shotgun in my lap, terrified of every little sound I heard. I had the time, sitting there, to think about my situation, to consider the plight of the man who dispatches his family to innocent country and sits afraid for his own life in his own home, simply because he wants to trade his labor for a decent wage, and the Baldwin men stepped up on the porch. Knocked politely at the front door. I kept my seat.

I heard them speak to each other quietly. Then one said my name, calling me Mister, still polite as Sunday morning. He tried the front door, rattled it gently against the latch, then walked sideways along the porch, a heavy pair of boots under the room I was sitting in. After more than a minute of silence, I heard the back door window shatter. A moment later, the door squeaked open, and the boots were inside my house ... "