THE KNACK OF DOING, exciting and beautifully crafted short stories

THE KNACK OF DOING: Stories
JEREMY M. DAVIES
Black Sparrow Books/David R. Godine, Publisher
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Knack of Doing is the debut collection of short fiction by Jeremy M. Davies, the author of the acclaimed indie novels, Rose Alley (2009) and Fancy (2015). Playful, fantastical, gruesome, and tender by turns, these stories run the gamut from parody to tragedy and back. Overflowing with "wit, irresistible ingenuity, and a stupefying narrative abundance" (Harry Mathews), perverse, playful, and highly comic stories that take dead aim at fictional and literary convention. These stories run the gamut from parody to tragedy and back, and reimagine the art of storytelling for the twenty-first century.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: In Days of Yore, my youthful audience, the knowing bookstore-browser of a certain taste and class would react to the presence of the Black Sparrow Press colophon with 1) immediate and unmannerly snatching, clutching, and unwilling surrendering to even the cashier; or 2) a delicate shivering, nothing so gross as a shudder, because the authors the press published were...louche, not parlor-chat material (eg, Wyndham Lewis, John Fante). I was in category 1.

Now Black Sparrow is an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher. Godine books were also to be greedily snatched because (unlike Black Sparrow books) they were gorgeously designed and produced, and the Godine colophon was a rock-solid guarantee of an excellent book and an excellent novel or story (you DO remember the difference between books and novels/stories, right?). When I asked the Godine folks for a copy of this book and they obliged, off I went down the rabbit-hole into the weird world of modern publishing and its shifts, changes, disappearances and reappearances, and general not-like-it-was-ness.

Twelve stories and a novella in about 200 pages of text? Whew. Economy of expression, anyone? I’ll probably never match that in making my comments, comme d'habitude, story by story in the Bryce Method, and can pretty much promise my attempts at summation will be significantly more prolix.

Forkhead Box brings to somewhat dingy life one Schaumann, the official executioner at Sing Sing. In his spare time, he breeds mice. They don’t all live, obviously, since he’s breeding them for various qualities. And clearly such a hobby, carried on in his basement, is obvious to his family.

Why keep secrets in any case? It would not have occurred to Schaumann that a deceit was worth the making. (It would not have occurred to Schaumann that a painting or poem was worth the making.)

I was a smidge puzzled about this title. I Googled the phrase and came away with a much enhanced appreciation of the story. I won’t spoiler it for you, as I’m strongly in favor of discovery being left to the individual. 4 stars

Sad White People (are there any other kind?) introduces Chris and Chris, a young couple (M/F) who are just about to end up as statistics. Or maybe in News of the Weird. I’d bet both. 3.5 stars

The Terrible Riddles of Human Sexuality (Solved) um, well now, umm…

5. Large and purple pastries filled with grape, threatening to drip down over a tobacco-stained counter on which loose gray hairs stir in the air conditioning. What am I?
(Answer: May can imagine the texture of the driver’s ears in her mouth. Cartilage is sexier than skin or bone. She is assembling a bok of aphorisms. May sees her mouth in the rearview: wide, with perfect square herbivore’s teeth. She spots lipstick on an incisor, even in the darkness of the cab, and takes out her hankie to erase it.)

Sixteen non-sequiturs starring May, a young...sex worker, though not exactly a prostitute, as you’ll see. Her world is bizarre. It is also completely bewitching. I love May the way I love Marilyn Monroe, simply drinking in all that she pours forth. 3.5 stars

The Dandy’s Garrote shows, in one Proustian sentence, how hard it is to know, socialize, love, care for, writers. Heh. 3.5 stars

Ten Letters chronicles the fearful imaginings of a father as his wife takes his twin sons, Willie and Nillie, to England via Cunard liner. So we’re already clear it’s set in the past, which is reinforced by the (imagined?) presence on the cruise of a phrenologist called Mahaffy. Phrenology, the pseudoscience responsible for more immoral mischief in the world than you’d ever imagine! That supporting beam of eugenics, apologist for racism! Well, anyway, dad has written ten letters to his sons, one for each day of the cruise, and he’s very worried about the influences they’ll fall under with Mahaffy paying court to their mother as a way to phrenologize the boys. His fears become more and more outlandish even as he admits (in his letter) that he would have nothing to say to any of his family were they all face to face. A tale of missed connections, misconnections, and misery caused and endured and perpetuated in the name of conventional expectations. 4 stars

The Excise-Man makes a lot of mileage out of the distaste of the colonial-era drinkers for paying the Crown its excise tax. (That never stopped, did it, since moonshiners are still (!) with us today.) The mob that pursues the excise-man makes a lot of stops, always just missing the slippery guy. At one inn, Cooper the innkeeper reveals to the assembled men that he is responsible for the rotation and motion of the planet Mars. He shows the men the apparatus. They’re all duly impressed, as is the reader, with the baroque conceit of planets controllable by machines human beings operate. But the excise-man! They want his hide! No sooner do the mob’s men leave Cooper’s inn, they meet up with various folks from their town...but old, so much older than is possible...Rip van Winkle and the Headless Horseman and Faust would all recognize this tale. That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun, because it surely is. 4 stars

Kurt Vonnegut and the Great Bordellos of the Danube Delta doesn’t involve Kurt Vonnegut or the Danube Delta or bordellos...directly, anyway...but is instead a thorough and thoroughly amusing dissection of writing, advice about writing, and the writer’s eternal dilemmas: Is this genius or junk, should I keep going or quit, am I kidding myself?

It seems I don’t need or want to go anywhere anymore. And I don’t see how words want, or what words want. I know, however, that I do want to read a story that makes me want to go blind. I want to root for a story that wants me to want something that I could not possibly want.
Do you believe this? Are you rooting for me?

It’s this kind of guff that writing advice produces. It’s the most complicated learning process of them all, learning how to make people want to read your words. I think it’s only possible to learn by doing, and that’s advice I got from...well...I got. And give. And Kurt Vonnegut? His eight rules for fiction writing success are very respectfully sent up. It’s a fun story to read, a pleasure to have read. 4 stars

The Sinces begins every paragraph with the sentence fragment, “Since you went away,...”, this being the lament of an abandoned husband. I found it more interesting as an exercise than a told tale:

Since you went away, I dream often of the end of the world; but by this I mean an end only to the comforts I still have in life, and the replacement of my familiar abstract distresses with the more acute ones represented by exposure to the elements, fighting for subsistence, resocialization into a community to which I can offer even less than I do the nominally civil, protective one I’m a member of now; that is, I often have nightmares.

It’s not a long story, thank goodness, and I for one say “good on ya, ya savvy sheila” to the lady for walking away from this navel-gazer. Still, it’s got an interesting point. I can’t remember what it is, but I remember thinking, that’s interesting; I should write that down; but, sadly, no pens were in reach and my computer was charging so not within reach; and by then, I’d forgotten it anyway. 3.5 stars

On the Furtiveness of Kurtz brings the jealous loathing of an abandoned husband for Madame’s new amour propre to its apotheosis:

But didn’t it occur to you, reading this book, Kurtz would ask, that such a verb is hardly in the spirit of plain-dealing? Didn’t it occur to you that to say of a man that he scuttles rather than walks isn’t, wasn’t, fair to him?
I don’t make the rules, Kurtz! The words I have to describe suspect or unattractive characteristics are themselves suspect or unattractive. When I speak of the scuttling, furtive Kurtz, it will seem to you that I am saying that he is the sort of man who, characteristically, scuttles and furts. Who could blame us if we didn’t want to meet such a man?

Or, as Conrad said the same thing: He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “‘The horror! The horror!” 4 stars

Illness as Metaphor bravely, if bewilderingly, co-opts the title of Susan Sontag’s famous long essay on exactly what it sounds like it’s about. A young woman’s mother, apparently with unintended (?) malice, announces to the nosy world that her daughter is ill.

They call now, incessantly, my mother’s friends, and ask what my disease is usually called. I can’t help them. I can say the name to myself, yes: silently. I can caress its syllables with the intangible tongue I’m still able to wag in my dreams of health. When it comes, however, to forcing the word, wet, into the air, and then through the thirty-six pinpricks in my telephone receiver, I am incapable.

I’ll be frank: I don’t care a single, solitary, tiny bit about this woman on page one of her blahblahblah. One thing she says resonates with me in a positive way: “You don’t appease illness by containing it. You appease it by spreading it.” So many illnesses are describable this way, social ills, mental illness, physical ailments, all appeased by their spread, their purpose to do entropy’s heavy lifting. Overall, though, not my favorite in the collection. 3 stars

Henrietta the Spider couldn’t be better named. The plump heroine, married to a skinny man and living with the man’s skinnier sister right next to their bedroom wall, snoring loud enough to wake the dead. Henrietta finds escape in killing their dog via spider-bites, which she’s also had but survived handily. As Henrietta loses herself in a haze of melancholy, her husband and sister-in-law dance attendance on her, try to ginger her up; in her turn, she hunts for the spiders that bit the dog to death and puts them in the beds of these kind souls. Nothing untoward happens. Damn. But as Henrietta lounges in a hot bath, her spider bite (long forgotten) starts acting up…. 4 stars

The Knack of Doing feels like the lack of doing. The husband/father/nephew we’re reading about has many people around him doing, acting on the world and being acted upon in return. Our nebbishy man has a moment of clarity as he defines his place in the world:

Is it that it skips a generation? He means this knack of doing. His uncle and now his son are or were, what, in the thick of life, the marrow or whatever, they decide and their decisions have consequences, they are agents, they act, they effect. Or: the species, the culture, it acts through them--they are in concert with what is basic in the animal, while he, in his neck of the woods, at his desk, in the dark...he is the chaff, he is what’s discarded, cut out, boiled away; already he’s overripe.

I don’t know if he’s overripe, but he’s sure as hell rotten with self-pity. The title story of the collection, this couldn’t better sum up what you’re going to get when you get here: men mired down, men weighed heavily upon, women who abandon them, and the consuming, subsumed rage that destroys and disfigures our modern world. 3.5 stars

Delete the Marquis is a postmodern novella, a riff of the late Wayne Dyer-esque “think it into being” school of self-help, and an hommage (intentional or not) to Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” mixed with The Count of Monte Cristo.

Don Miguel, a broke and broken hack writer, with a broken...let’s say he’d be a Cialis customer and leave it at that...pays a visit to the Mesmerist healer, Marquis de Puységur, whose Animal Magnetism cure for all that ails him is paid for by hack-writing crummy period romances under the names supplied by le Marquis. This visit Don Miguel is accompanied by that most annoying of traveling companions, someone that one used to know but can’t quite place, and one is very sure that it’s preferable not to. Victor, it turns out, is the young boy who tended Don Miguel’s father in his dying days. This is shocking, since threadbare Don Miguel sees before him not the deformed, stupid peasant lad he remembers, but a bright and wealthy (if overdressed) and articulate man also on his way to avail himself of the Marquis’s services thus also of Don Miguel’s:

I lost no time in making clear to the man that there were, indeed, no Victors on my client list (to my sure and certain knowledge), and in that case--though I could not guess what he hoped to achieve with his persiflage--I hadn’t been able to write a word for anyone in at least three years’ time, this sorry admission demonstrating that we had not even begun to pry open the gate through which we might escape Victor’s labyrinth of dissimulation; as such, there could be no doubt, I said, that he was nothing but a singularly maladroit confidence man, whose plans to rob me or otherwise do me ill patently required the attentions of a ghostwriter of genius to revise into a workable draft.

On goes the parrying and thrusting, Don Miguel trying to evade the bullets Victor shoots into his character and his role in all the ills and developments of the world as we know it. Handy for Puységur, isn’t it, to have the author on his string, dependent on him and yet he depending on the hack.

Finally, as the men roll up to the Marquis’s gorgeous chateau, Victor shoots the fatal bolt into illusion’s meaty, beating heart:

It would be one thing for you to give us everything that you have given willingly, but it’s quite another for the Marquis to use you as a lamp does its oil, or, perhaps more appositely, a pen its ink.

Is there parity between the Marquis and the hack? Because each is solely dependent on the other for his place in the world, or is the hack’s involvement, being unwitting (he never remembers his visits to the Marquis thanks to his Animal Magnetism treatments), his absolution from guilt?

It’s a lovely, baroque conceit and made in the language of the period it takes place (as Victor notes), and in its arc it also strikes the self-help community’s tendency to invent or repurpose every cultural trend’s leavings, like any good scavenger would. 5 stars

As a whole, this collection was a pleasure to read. It promised me it was (or Rikki Ducornet did in her blurb and Davies was once her editor at Dalkey Archive so I can trust her) “...really dark, like a black chocolate bar deviled with morning glory seeds and strychnine.” And it delivered on that promise, delivered on the promise to make me laugh (“wit and a stupefying narrative abundance” per Harry Matthews), Davies is an author who delivers. If you want what he’s delivering, it’s a festive and pleasurable read. I wanted. I got. Isn’t that the best way to finish a review?

ALLEGHENY FRONT, the 2016 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction winner

This was my first monthly short-story collection review for late, lamented site, The Oak Wheel. Since May is National Short Story Month, a few other favorites might appear as well. Sarabande Books and Matthew Neill Null collaborated to produce a beautiful book, and a beautiful literary work. Lydia Millet deserves our thanks for selecting ALLEGHENY FRONT as the 2016 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction.

ALLEGHENY FRONT
MATTHEW NEILL NULL
Sarabande Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Most Anticipated Books of 2016, The Millions
Top Summer Books 2016, Publisher's Weekly
Set in the author's homeland of West Virginia, this panoramic collection of stories traces the people and animals who live in precarious balance in the mountains of Appalachia over a span of two hundred years, in a disappearing rural world. With omniscient narration, rich detail, and lyrical prose, Matthew Neill Null brings his landscape and characters vividly to life.
"Allegheny Front has few sentimental trappings. . . . Men's stubbornness is a rock face, in these intelligent and unpretentious stories, their anger a crown fire, their occasional tenderness a rill. . . . It remains at a distance from judgment, at a remove from easy definitions, unspooling a lucid and often painful history of appetite, exploitation, and bereavement."—Lydia Millet, from the introduction

My Review: As I always do with short-story collections, I’ll move from story to story, offer up a smidgen of opinion, and some relevant quotes. At the end, I will try to sum up my overall response to the collection, and what I see as its particular merits. My online friend Bryce taught me how much more useful and meaningful a review of a diverse collection is in this format, so I call it “the Bryce Method.” And so, without further ado and from the top:

Something You Can’t Live Without demonstrates that people have always been people, time and place and customs and morals aside. We’re pretty much alike, thanks to evolutionary hard-wiring, and unique in how we go about performing our pre-programmed stunts in the world.
When a young man called Cartwright inherits an older man’s job of commission selling farming implements to the hardscrabble farmers of West Virginia, he also inherits a diary of local knowledge that makes him a darn near perfect salesman in the eyes of his bosses. He rides his two-horse wagon all over beautiful 1901 West Virginia, summer days not excepted:

He swabbed his face with his tie. Soon, the sun burned off the fog and hoisted itself in the sky. 'Horses, it's hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock. I tell you that much.'
He took another little drink. Bottle-flies turned their emerald backs in the sun. Young monarchs gathered to tongue the green horseshit and clap their wings.

It sounds idyllic to modern city-dwellers, or at least it does to this one. For Cartwright, it’s hot and he has to unload...that is, sell for a fair price...an expensive plow. He is at the end of his stock, the end of the road, and the end of his rope until he meets the McBride twins, whom he can only tell apart because one has nine fingers. He lapses into salesmanship the way a preacher does into droning tones, and the boys take him to meet their father.
Cartwright, like all good salesmen, can smell money, and this farm lacks the perfume. The McBrides try the plow out, like the ease of it, and begin to bargain; Cartwright demurs and demands cash. However, there are always exceptions to this hard-and-fast company rule, especially when the family reveals a secret: A fossilized cave bear sits partially entombed in a cave nearby! Think of the money it’s worth! Buying fossils was a common practice at the time, just as it is now in China. Cartwright’s greed clobbers his good sense, and he and the nine-fingered twin set out to the cave to see the bear. It’s there, all right, face sticking out into the cave’s emptiness, waiting to be released at last:

Cartwright grooved the chisel's tooth into the base of the skull, where the spine would fuse, and lifted the hammer. The chisel jumped in his hand and half the skull turned to silt. It cascaded down the rock wall with the faintest sigh. The {nine-fingered} boy let out a string of oaths so profane, so unparalleled, that surely they'd been inspired by a hell so near.
Cartwright was glad to have a hammer in hand.

And let the lesson be this simple: Never con a con-man. One of you ends up dead.

Mates pits one fine old man, honorable as the day is long, against the forces of change no one can really expect or plan for. He is simple in the elegant Japanese or Amish sense. His is a worldview that he absorbed unchallenged and passed to his sons as best he could. It fell on deaf ears and racing hearts, all testosterone fueled and ambition driven. These young men, and their almost-foreign wives, could never see a stream unless the ambled into it by accident; they certainly couldn’t or wouldn’t ever see it as Sull does:

Sull imagined wild brook trout, cold and firm in the fast, healthy current, buried in the water like ingots of precious metal. They hold fast to the bank, laurel-green with bellies of coal-fire. Wilder colors than you'd dare imagine on your own. Stock had destroyed the run--to be truthful, {his family} had--and silky mud rose off the bottom in slow veils where the Angus dropped their hooves. Do rivers have ghosts? Do trout swim in the air?

Sull has a finely developed sense of place and of his place in that world. His musings and sensitivities cover the heart of a farmer more used to bad luck than good. When a predator starts raiding his winter larder of Rockingham hens, Sull thinks it’s a fox. Logical, since foxes are common in West Virginia and long storied as hen-stealers. Even leg-traps won’t catch this clever bastard!

Because he’s an eagle. A bald eagle, to be precise, and Sull does what any chicken-and-dumplings lovin’ farmer does to a predator stealing the chicken: He shoots the damn thing. Nails it to the barn, too, as a message to any other bald eagle puttering around and thinking Rockingham sounds good for dinner tonight.

And then the kerfuffle begins in earnest. Increasingly senior bird-and-turtle sheriffs...that is, game wardens...all life-long friends of Sull and his family, come around to remind him it’s a federal crime to shoot, kill, snatch, or harm any bald eagle, and the penalties are no joke. When Sull gives in to their well-intentioned but much resented interference, the she-eagle exacts her price for her widowhood in Rockingham raiding. Exactly as he knew she, or another eagle, would. The slow burn of the cheated farmer begins:

For a long while, he sat on the steps and sharpened the chain-saw blade with a round file, dipping it in bar-and-chain oil and raking it over each tooth with sleek, grating sounds. He lost himself in the rhythm of the labor. A victory over tears is a small thing, but it was his. The sky went from indigo to blackness, and he saw nothing ominous in it, nothing but cold stars wheeling in their course, a course determined by the same firm hand he hoped was guiding his own. But satellites, too, crossed the sky in sly, winking arcs. Sull knew that. He could not let himself be confounded. He went inside, to sleep beside his wife.

The eagle’s nest, now obviously a barren one, is in an old red oak tree. Farmers don’t like to cut down red oaks, they provide acorns to nourish pigs (and people if the winter’s bad enough). But there she is, fat and full of his Rockinghams.

Down goes the oak. Down comes the nest. And revenge? Revenge, if you’ve never noticed, never ends.

Natural Resources is a quick recap of the Circle of Anthropocene Destruction. It’s too short to be more than a mouthful, but contains this sparkly gem:

But the earth turns, and old ways are reexamined. The insurance companies say there are so many deer, so many wrecks. They have algorithms on their side. Kill more deer. Let all the predators live.

Gauley Season begins with this perfect atmospheric, informative paragraph:

Labor Day. We could hear their bellow and grind from the Route 19 overpass. Below, the river gleamed like a flaw in metal. Leaving the parking lot behind, we billy-goated down the fisherman's trail, one by one, the way all mountain people do. Loud clumps of bees clustered in the fireweed and boneset, and the trail underfoot crunched with cans, condom wrappers, worm containers. A half-buried coal bucket rose from the dirt with a galvanized grin. The laurel hell wove itself into a tunnel, hazy with gnats. There, a busted railroad spike. The smell of river water filled our noses.

Honestly, I’d feel I’d done right by you if that’s all I told you about the story. This is my choice for chef d'oeuvre.

Well, I can’t do that. I have to tell you that the story is a tragic and horrible accident on the Gauley River’s latest service to mankind, rafting the rapids in the summer when the Army Corps of Engineers allow the nearest dam to spill close to the natural flow sacrificed when rural electrification came to this slice of back-country. Kelly Bischoff, survivor of several kinds of employment changes as the resources being extracted from the wealth and welter of West Virginia change, end up starting the first rafting adventure company owned by a local and hiring locals only. After Kelly loses control of a raft full of tourists, good fortune smiles his way one last time as only two people die: a teen girl and her father. The rest of his life, of course, is a hell of regret and understated suspicion:

{T}hen he whispered something that turned Reed pale and bloodless--and that Reed wouldn't tell about until years later. 'You're the one lied about Meadow Creek,' Kelly said. 'Lied about finding her. Why would you do that to me?'
We left him there as the drawknife of dusk peeled back the world.

A man like Kelly, a local success brought low by an accident, well you can just imagine the stories folks whisper. Even Kelly tells a tale about the accident that shocks the socks off his listeners. As you’d expect, a well-known man deprived of his status...it’s worse than actual physical death, and it’s shared out among all the mountaineers and rafters to come.

Telemetry is a moment in the arc of a woman’s life when her decisions, her loyalties, and her sense of place all collide. Kathryn Tennant leads a field team of biologists for a pleasant camping trip near a trout stream. I mean, a field assignment to study movement patterns among the trout via insertion into the fish of a tracking device. She’s at the end of her degree studies; her mom is still here, the reason she stayed in West Virginia for school; her previous years of field work have given her confidence in her data and data-gathering techniques. Her findings will hold up, her work will back up an informative and necessary finding if trout, recreational fishing’s basic fish, are to thrive here. Most anywhere, in fact; she is a real scientist making real contributions to the world. She has been on this trajectory for some time:

{W}hy did she go into the field? A twinge of pleasure, of knowledge. Her dad would pull over to the side of a bridge, and they would watch from above, before he slipped down the bank to catch them. She was charmed by the motions of trout. How they take their forms from the pressures of another world, the cold forge of water. Their drift, their mystery, the way they turn and let the current take them, take them, with passive grace. They turn again, tumbling like leaves, then straighten with mouths pointing upstream, to better sip a mayfly, to root up nymphs, to watch for the flash of a heron's bill. The current always trues them, like compass needles. When she watches them, she feels wise.

And for this year’s fieldwork, the insurance year, she has two male companions, Michael and Gary, who are doing their own researches in the riparian biome. That she is sleeping with Michael when Gary wants her too doesn’t make things easy for her; add in the arrival of Nedermeyer, an apparent survivalist and his daughter Shelly across the meadow and tensions spread like kudzu vines. Shelly has sticky fingers. Nedermeyer probably has PTSD. Their tent looks like a Civil War holdover.

Without much ever being said, the two groups begin to hang out. Proximity counts for a lot in a place this remote:

The boulderfields, the spaces empty of people--a lonesomeness city-dwellers could never comprehend. Sometimes it seems like you know animals more intimately than people. Beaver heads cutting wake in the water, bear shit jeweled with seeds, deer quenching themselves in the river's cool. Her family has lived here for three hundred years. But the place is wretchedly poor and backward and may never be right.

A Fourth of July celebration gone horribly wrong proves to Kathryn that she is that saddest of people, the one who loses home from gaining perspective. She is a reluctantly eager exile, the inevitable result of all her choices that were made all unknowing of the price coming due.

The Island in the Gorge of the Great River is a ten or twelve acre scrap of isolation where “the county” sends people to die. Given the date we’re provided for this event, 1890, it’s pretty safe to assume the disease being fought is tuberculosis. Local boys, as boys always have, taunt and torment anyone who comes to the island’s near shore. John Drew, our PoV character, sees and falls for a young girl whose response to him (only him) is saucy and flirtatious. John is obsessed, haunts the shore, and when he no longer sees the lassie or she runs off home, he trudges to the family home:

He returned to Pinch, waiting for the mine whistle to break the day into pieces. When it did, the miners surfaced with empty lunch buckets, leaving the portal, walking the narrow main drag with its bank, post office, and commissary. They found their own company shacks in straggling rows three deep, each one identical, with the same stovepipe, same curl of smoke, same yellow dog lazing in a bare yard. its tail beginning to wag.

John’s father, a very good man, comes home from the mines and makes his best attempts to instill values into his son. While John listens, he retains his obsession with the girl on the island of death. It comes to the point that John attempts, in a rickety canoe he’s never handled before, to find his young love. It goes, as you’d expect, horribly wrong:

He sees the lights of heaven, but they are as pale and indistinct and more than a little disappointing: Fayetteville, with its new row of gaslights on the river road. … {H}e can’t go home to face his mother and father, where they mattock small graves from a hillside, and that is a kind of death. He has a sliver of ice. Home is not for him. He lies breathing. He is rushing on.

Is he less dead because he’s breathing? John Drew, given nineteenth-century communications, is unlikely to see or speak to anyone from Pinch ever again. He is launched into a future he will navigate without guides or help.

Rocking Stone is the shortest piece in the collection, the lightest in weight, the least in meaning for my eyes. An unmarried great-uncle takes delight in the children of his nephew’s home, leading them around the woods on their few acres, teaching them mountain lore and playing silly jokes and games with them. When a habitual joke backfires in a horrible way, the family dynamic is forever shifted.

For all of me, the old coot got what was coming to him for playing practical jokes on little girls. Definitely my least favorite story.

The Slow Lean of Time follows the adventures and misadventures of Sarsen, an experienced log drover, and his latest charity case, a drover-wannabe called Henry who was supposed to come with his cousin to learn log-droving.

Henry’s only seventeen, a boy really, and leaving his home to walk to the Gauley River logging head doesn’t keep him from appreciating the river’s life and death struggles:

An awful, heartbroken cackling from the reeds behind. A vortex formed. A hole in the water. Into this, tufts of feathers disappeared. Turning, Henry saw the fish inhale two ducklings. The others broke into the main river and were swept downstream, their mother with them. The thrashing fish threw water like a canoe blade. Gills flared as it wolfed them down. Henry looked about, frantic, but no one else was there to see, no one to assure him it was true.

Almost the first person he meets, though he’s looking for his cousin, is the loud, powerful senior log-drover Sarsen, a mountain of muscle and experience. Henry, a scrawny kid to look at but not without muscle power of his own, is in awe of Sarsen and willingly follows his instructions on droving. When the day’s down-time begins, Sarsen is still the center of Henry’s world:

He lifted the thrashing muskellunge, held it up for the world to see, and let the thrash go out of its body in a final, lurking shudder. He had pierced it through, a third of the way behind its head. Pale out of the water, all dull greenish-bronze and insipid vermiculations, except for reddish fins that reminded Henry of his mother's hard tack candy. It had the teeth of a nasty little dog. Sarsen slid its body down off the staff, leaving a watery braid of blood. Off the pike, its wound seemed to close. He lifted it by the tail and hollered.

Sarsen could do anything.

What Sarsen can’t do is prevent tragedy, change, unhappiness, and the inevitable relegation of the used-up veteran of jobs that don’t exist to that horrible non-position of “character.” He tells his stories, tends his bar, and waits and waits for a chance to make right on his long-ago tragic callousness. When it arrives, Sarsen--a big spirit and bold heart to the last--takes his power into his hands and makes his fate.

In the Second District traces the fall of a family from power, the death of a way of life, and the many ropes that tie a community together, sometimes too tightly. Bear hunting is now a very controversial subject. Those unaffected by bears’ clever and destructive survival tactics, like destroying garbage cans and eating the family dog, want the creatures left to thrive in their old homeland. People living there take a very different view, needless to say. Not only does their hunting bond fathers and sons, making them part of a fraternity of hunters, but it brings in significant money from the Chinese. A bear’s gall bladder is a valued aphrodisiac in Eastern medicine in general, and that means of course that trade in them is illegal. Then again, so is public drunkenness.

Poor old dog is going to die anyway, most likely, since a cornered bear doesn’t mind who or what it swats to death in an attempt to be free.

As the Second District’s customs change, its needs must get met in other ways. A Senator’s son becomes a small-town shady lawyer. A Senator’s grandson becomes a Methodist preacher. And the other side of their family, gained by marriage, commit senseless and violent crimes, get sent to the penitentiary: the future of a collapsed economy’s leavings, toxic as mine waste.

These are nine worthy stories, and at least two of them could make really good movies on very small budgets. Lydia Millet, whose task it was to select the 2016 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, served us the reading public very very well in making this choice. Beautiful prose and a native’s irreplaceable eye for home ground combine to create a wonderful reading experience. This is a fine entry into the genre of grit lit. Lives as rough as moonshine going down the wrong pipe, as blasted as a meth lab accident become tough, challenging art in Null’s gifted hands.