In his wonderfully cranky Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner exhorted his fellow writers to create from the heart, not “the glands.” Address the immortal truths, he instructed: “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

The novelist Jesmyn Ward pinned this speech above her desk. Her memoir and three novels — produced in the span of less than a decade — feel hewn from these grand Faulknerian verities. Not for her the austerity and self-conscious ironies of so much American fiction; her books reach for the sweep, force and sense of inevitability of the Greek myths, but as translated to the small, mostly poor, mostly black town in Mississippi where she grew up and where she still lives.

Her characters are tested not by the gods but by other elements, no less absolute in their pronouncements. “Salvage the Bones” (2011), her National Book Award-winning novel, follows a family caught in Hurricane Katrina (which Ward and her family narrowly survived). “Men We Reaped” (2013), her memoir, is a requiem for five young black men, including the author’s brother, who were lost to murder, suicide and addiction.

However eternal its concerns, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Ward’s new book, is perfectly poised for the moment. It combines aspects of the American road novel and the ghost story with a timely treatment of the long aftershocks of a hurricane and the opioid epidemic devouring rural America.