The sickness started slowly, subtly.

First, a red ring around the eyes. Then a cough, followed by shortness of breath.

		"HAWK'S NEST" By Hubert Skidmore University of Tennesee Press ($19.95)

Quickly, though, the cough became wracking and a man would nearly choke trying to catch his wind. Then he died, all in less than a year's time.

Hubert Skidmore's novel lays out hundreds of such deaths in a read that is shocking and depressing.

Based on true events that occurred in the early 1930s in south-central West Virginia, where thousands of Depression-starved men headed from across the country when they learned of work in a huge tunnel being drilled where the New and Gauley rivers joined to form the Kanawha River.

The state of West Virginia billed it as a massive project to divert river water into a 3-mile hole to spin a turbine and create electricity for the public.

But in reality, the $4 million project was a sweetheart deal with the Union Carbide Corp., which needed the juice for a smelting plant it planned to build below the tunnel on the Kanawha.

West Virginians didn't know that, just as the 5,000 men who would eventually work in the tunnel weren't told another nasty secret:

Much of the sandstone rock they were drilling and blasting through contained nearly 100 percent pure silica, that, when disturbed and turned into silica dioxide dust, fouled the lungs of the workers, killing hundreds of them.

An exact count will never be known, because as soon as a man died, his body was spirited away to a burial ground miles away. Record-keeping was sloppy if nonexistent, and because most of the workers were transients, their families, if they had any, never knew what happened to them.

And as the disease progressed and men could not make it to work, they were fired, with the company knowing that they would head back home to Tennessee or Georgia or out West and die there, with a diagnosis of pneumonia or tuberculosis or consumption, diseases that couldn't be linked to tunnel work.

In fact, the malady that killed them -- not tunnelitis, as the largely uneducated black and white workers called it, but silicosis -- was not even recognized as a disease until well after men actually began dropping dead, sometimes at the tunnel face.

Skidmore's book chronicles several individual workers and families, many of whose members are not around when the book ends. They were among the official count of 432 people who died from the tunnel work, although unofficial estimates place the toll at 764 and higher.

Interestingly, Skidmore's book is not a new work. A West Virginia native who learned of the disaster and was urged by his mother to write about it, he finished the novel in 1939, and Doubleday and Doran published it in 1941.

But it was immediately pulled from the market for reasons that are now unknown. Many theories exist:

It was a victim of pressure by Union Carbide; it was a victim of increasing intolerance of supposed anti-American intellectualism; it was censored by anti-labor interests; the subcontractor who built the tunnel for Union Carbide threatened to sue the publisher.

Several hundred copies were published, however, and those survivors, plus an increased interest by Appalachian historians in one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history, led to its republication this year by the University of Tennessee Press under the "Appalachian Echoes" series of titles.

The story is heartbreaking.