Her story and those of dozens of others - victims, families, descendants - come together like dots on a pointillist canvas until a portrait is revealed of a place and its people over a span of two generations.

The eponymous Maid is the grandmother’s narrator, a woman still scarred by the loss of her sister in the fire and what she sees as the corruption and cover-up afterward. “But I’ve heard a lot of the rumors and variations over the years, and some of them made it into the book.” “It’s just lingered as unsolved tragedies do,” he says. There really was such a dance hall fire in Woodrell’s town, and it never was satisfactorily explained as far as many residents were concerned. The Depression-era tragedy, with couples cut down in their prime and bodies burned beyond recognition, became as much a wound for the locals as Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in years to come.

His latest novel, “The Maid’s Version,” taps into those family stories, recounting both the prelude and the decades-long repercussions of a dance-hall explosion that killed some 42 people in a small Ozarks town. Some headstones evoke stories he knows by heart, some are known to him only by name. On his afternoon walks he likes to visit a cemetery where his ancestors lie. His family has lived in the same neighborhood for nearly a century, but he’s the last of that line still there. We spoke to Woodrell on an autumn afternoon when some of the leaves were still on the trees, and still green, outside his back-porch office in West Plains, Mo., near the Arkansas line. So it’s important to always push yourself to read the best you can find in any direction you feel like going.” And I do believe that the kind of thing you read will have a lot to do with the kind of thing you write.

“It all goes into the same river, that’s the way I think about it. “I’m not a competitive guy, especially with the dead, so I’m willing to be in the company of greater talents,” he says. But he has always kept them close at hand in his office: “Flannery (O’Connor) and Chekhov and Cain and Hammett and Chandler and Hemingway” - a reminder of how much he has loved literature and how he managed to stick to writing during 10 years when it was a vocation, not a profession. So for years, those books went untouched.

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell