COTTONMOUTHS, a GritLit Lesbian take on "Winter's Bone"

COTTONMOUTHS
KELLY J. FORD
Skyhorse Publishing
$22.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: This was Drear’s Bluff. Nothing bad happened here. People didn’t disappear.

College was supposed to be an escape for Emily Skinner. But after failing out of school, she’s left with no choice but to return to her small hometown in the Ozarks, a place run on gossip and good Christian values.

She’s not alone. Emily’s former best friend—and childhood crush—Jody Monroe is back with a baby. Emily can’t resist the opportunity to reconnect, despite the uncomfortable way things ended between them and her mom’s disapproval of their friendship. When Emily stumbles upon a meth lab on Jody’s property, she realizes just how far they’ve both fallen.

Emily intends to keep her distance from Jody, but when she’s kicked out of her house with no money and nowhere to go, a paying job as Jody’s live-in babysitter is hard to pass up. As they grow closer, Emily glimpses a future for the first time since coming home. She dismisses her worries; the meth is a means to an end. And besides, for Emily, Jody is the real drug.

But when Emily’s role in Jody’s business turns dangerous, her choices reveal grave consequences. As the lies pile up, Emily will learn just how far Jody is willing to go to save her own skin—and how much Emily herself has risked for the love of someone who may never truly love her back.

Echoin*g the work of authors like Daniel Woodrell and Sarah Waters, Cottonmouths is an unflinching story about the ways in which the past pulls us back . . . despite our best efforts to leave it behind.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: You probably went to Sunday school. Your mama and daddy taught you about Right and Wrong and never the twain shall meet and you either rolled your eyes and agreed to shut them up or absorbed it with every spongy fiber of your kid-soul. Most likely some of both.

But that "moral grounding" does el zippo to prepare you for end-stage capitalism's vampirous demands.

It sure as Hell didn't prepare li'l Emily.

Where she was headed, the cast iron skillet had been seasoned before she was born.
Her mom would cook the beans, potatoes, and cornbread the way her own mother had taught her. Dad would recite the Lord’s Prayer because it required no thought. And Emily would stare at her plate of food and let it go cold while pondering the headset and the cash register and the brown and blue uniform in her back seat, whose fibers still held its last tenant’s stench of fryer grease and body odor—items for a life she had not expected to return to when she left for college, for a job that would not have been offered to her at all had she not removed the name of the state university from her resume—though two years hardly called for its inclusion.

Now you name me a worse feeling than being forced, as an adult, to go to the place you're used to calling Home when it's about as much home as that deep-fat fryer you're smellin' right now.

For a Lesbian sister in a christian-values community, this is WORSE than being in so much debt that you can never dig yourself out, right? Hold my beer, says Author Kelly, I am about to make this fryin' pan seem nuclear powered:

Watching her walk away, Emily felt as dirty as if she’d been watching porn. The craving came on like a fever, as if a coal had been stoked within and blurred the edges of reasonable thought. Rather than push it away, she sat on the floor and let the desire consume her.
–and–
Then an ache no bigger than a marble pulsed inside Emily, an ache born in the woods across the creek. An ache that beat on inside her, steady, steadier, growing until her whole body shook.
–but–
That was the worst of it, to be accused but denied the pleasure of what everyone thought.

That is how Emily responds to the sight of Jody, her long-ago never-was one-that-got-away. Everyone...yeah. Lots of Everyone in Drear's Bluff (isn't that a superb distillation of Home, fellow former Southerners?), and man are they a bunch of self-righteous goobers. Nothing new there...that's how most people are. That's how so many can't help but be, given their lack of moral fiber to resist group-think.

Emily's true self, her inner self, is under siege at home, and she's got to get out...Jody, the woman who revs up her nights this decade-plus, has a solution: Come watch my baby for me! Live here, I'll give you some cash, and you're out of the house. Remember that frying pan?

“This is like the worst stereotype of the South come to life. All you need is a Confederate flag over the fucking door.”
–and–
All those wasted moments of guilt and shame and feeling downright wrong about what she’d done in the bed the night Jody left.
–and–
No matter how tempting the offer, she knew that half a life was no life at all.

It's never, ever the same, not after leaving or coming back; the world's moved on, so have your feelings, so has the person you once had the feelings for. You're in for it, though, while the ride lasts; you're not going to get off until the merry-go-round's slung you onto the bouncy-castle at 55mph and you've gone sailing through the air but there's a landing coming...one you don't have any way to cushion, or even prepare for....

Lovers would come and go. Maybe there’d be one who would be unafraid and teach Emily how to be brave, brave enough to wake up next to her, to walk hand in hand. Someone with whom she’d have a nice life, without trouble and with love. But in the twilight hours of her life, when her body and memory failed, this above all others would be the buoy she would cling to, the memory she would repeat and repeat until the darkness ripped her away. Because this moment, so small, the smallest, had seared her heart.

I wish I'd been able to full-five-star the read; the thing that kept me from doing it was a certain soap-opera quality that, while I didn't hate it (I used to watch All My Children, FFS, I'm not immune to the appeal!), I found...wearing. I wanted something that rose above it more often than something planted squarely in it, and that little niggle took the luster off just enough to be noticeable.

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME by Donald Ray Pollock is a fine novel about rough people

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME
Donald Ray Pollock
Anchor Books
$16.95 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

SEPTEMBER 2020 IS HERE! WATCH THE TRAILER AND MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THE DEBUT ON THE 16TH!

2020 UPDATE The film's Netflix debut comes in September, and here's a taste of what's to come. (Please overlook the source, the info is in fact good.)

***2017 UPDATE***A FILM IS COMING***starring Robert Pattinson as Reverend Roy. This will be interesting.***

The Publisher Says: “Take a man from Ohio who's worked blue collar, send him for an M.F.A., and set him loose. From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff—called “powerful, remarkable, exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times—comes a dark and riveting vision of America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree. 

In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic over­tones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting. 

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right. 

Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.”

My Review: This is Donald Ray Pollock's first novel. After being mauled and kicked by Knockemstiff, his short-story collection, I was chomping at the bit for this book to come in to my village library. Today was my first wholly peaceful day, and what better thing to do with a peaceful day than to read about the broken and forgotten members of Murrikin society?

So I got on the Greyhound for Knockemstiff, garlic around my neck and an illegal assault rifle perched in the seat beside me, scared stiff that one of these Hill Williams was gonna start some shit with the fancy New Yorker getting' off the bus.

Funnily enough, that's exactly what happened.
.
Look...read Knockemstiff (my review here) and, if you feel the need to bleach your eyeballs and you want to scream, cry, and unswallow on average once a page, this isn't the book for you. It's not that worse things happen in it, although some do happen that made me scream, cry, and unswallow, it's that this novel is unremittingly grim and a lot less easy to stop reading than a story collection is.

I started this book around 4pm. It's now 3am. I paused long enough to eat some cucumber and tomato salad and a wedge of watermelon around 10pm, and I think I piddled around midnight...but that was with the book propped open on the tank top. I'll mop the floor tomorrow...errrmmm, later today.

Pollock is the kind of writer Hemingway wanted to be. Simple, elegantly shod, carefully manicured sentences whip out their truncheons and, never mind the flying blood, wail on the innocent reader's brain-box. Dazed, in pounding agony from the grinding of severely fractured bone plates in the readerly skull, eyes absorb and record and flinch away from the matter-of-fact violence. It's not played for gore or shock. Pollock just...writes it the way it was in his head.

Mother of all the gods. That sentence scares me shitless.

The stories that make up the braids of the novel are, in themselves, good novellas. Put together, though, the effect is overkill. Oh dear. Bad choice of words. It's one bridge too far into horrorville. The last thirty or so pages, while well written, just didn't keep up the pace of revelation. In every other part of the book, there was a blood clot coming loose and causing fresh damage as the characters got closer to the inevitable ending...so I kept moving...and then, well, some of that sense of howcanhetopthis zomg he did it got lost.

And now I will be turning on the Snarkinator. Those whose tastes are for tomes lit'ry which ahhhr evah sew reefahayned, please seek the exits.

Pollock got an MFA. I find MFA writers are all much of a muchness to me. A bit like opening a box of dried dates hoping for something other than a sugar coma, permaybehaps a peppermint or a Red Hot secreted in amongst the sticky soft sweetness. I have my list of offenders, but I've puked on them elsewhere, so I'll leave it at Paul Auster Jeffrey Eugenides Jonathan Franzen Dave Eggers Jonathan Safran Foer et alii, none of whose books I can tell apart from the authors's various ouevres without a look at the spine or title page. Yes yes, nice sentence, lovely image, I'm sorry was something supposed to move me here, to reach across the gap between our brains and change me? Cause it sure as pork rinds didn't. And it never does, all the mooin' and carryin'-on y'all groupies do aside.

And the last, well, last six or so chapters of this novel? They're the first time I felt Pollock's MFA intrude into his writing. He's still got more potency in his keyboarding fingers than those boys. I knock off a whoppin' tenth of a star from perfect because of that. It's a little like complaining that the blowjob didn't last long enough (I don't have any idea what the equivalent is for women, sorry ladies but I am just not anxious to know either). Describe the worst sex you ever had: It was marvelous, as the old joke goes.

And, not a small consideration, is it me, or is it he? I could simply be grumping about this because the way things turn out isn't the way I want them to. But hang on! The ending, you'll recall I said above, is inevitable. And it is. The only ending this book could have. I liked it!

So maybe, just maybe, it's that bloody degree reefahayneeng the gasoline-and-pigshit essence of this wonderful book. I sure as all get-out hate that idea. I suspect it's true. But, and this is KEY, do NOT let this discourage you from visiting the bottom of the heap with Pollock. This is the real deal.

The real deal.

EDITED TO ADD 10/25/2012: The novel has won the Best Foreign Crime Novel prize in France!

BROWN BOTTLE: A NOVEL by Sheldon Lee Compton, honed like a knife & wielded without mercy

BROWN BOTTLE: A Novel
SHELDON LEE COMPTON
Bottom Dog Press
$17.00 trade paper, OR $8.00 Kindle, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Wade “Brown Bottle” Taylor is an alcoholic trying to protect his nephew Nick from the hardness of their region, Eastern Kentucky, and the world in general. He must end Nick's involvement with drugs and drug dealers in the area, and, fueled by his love for his nephew, Brown knows he must be the one to intervene to save him. But in order to save Nick, Brown must first save himself, overcoming a lifetime spent convinced he was unworthy. Brown Bottle's journey is one of selflessness and love, redemption and sacrifice, if only for a time.

My Review: When I saw that Donald Ray Pollock, of KNOCKEMSTIFF fame, called the author of this novel "a hillbilly Bukowski," that was it. I asked Bottom Dog Press for a review copy and was blessed with one. And let me say this right up front: Pollock's assessment is spot-on.

"Brown Bottle" is the unkind-yet-accurate nickname given to Wade Taylor, co-centerpiece of the story's arc with Stan Collins. Brown is an alcoholic and a Vietnam vet. Stan is a plain, common-or-garden alcoholic. They live in Portville, Port County, the farthest eastern stretch of Kentucky. Coal was king until the 1970s, and now opiods and meth are the kings. Sadly, the two alcoholic tough men (who don't indulge in drug use) each have a beloved relative involved with drugs. Brown's nephew Nick, abandoned by his mother when at the most annoying rebellious stage of adolescence, is a drug user and petty thief; Stan's little brother Tuck is the picture of the repulsive little guy who deals to feel big:

Tuck had always been made smaller made than Stan. Narrow shoulders, tiny hands and short fingers. Even as a young man his brown eyes were always watering like he'd been crying and his face never took hair well. What he had instead were four or five patches of hair that looked like a cluster of bee stingers popping straight out from his cheeks.

It's not tough to work out the conflict that inevitably will arise between the strong protectors of these weak men. Nick is the North Star in Brown's sky, the one decent thing he thinks that's ever come out of Port County Taylors. He felt that way about Mary, Nick's mama, until she walked away and left Brown in charge (or not, it didn't seem to matter to her as she skedaddled to Ohio with some kind of snake-oil sellin' preacher) of Nick's arrival into manhood.

And here's Stan, living across the highway from Tuck's trailer, watching the streams of vehicles come, park, and go in minutes flat. He hates that this crazy business has made his brother a prisoner of drug suppliers and users, skittering from pillar to post in order to balance supply and demand. He himself is a disabled miner, a man of no use to anyone except his wife Hen (short for Henry, don't know why she's named that) and wanting to save Tuck. This being the Appalachians with the culture of self-reliance and clannishness that is native to hardscrabble places the world over, Stan doesn't figure on calling in the troopers unless forced to. He figured without Brown's iron determination to cut Nick off at the supply end of his drug habit.

So what's a protective uncle to do? Scare the living daylights out of Tuck, that's what. Bust in the trailer door, shake the little rat around some, make sure he thinks twice and doesn't sell Nick another snort. Good plan. But Hen, though she's not Tuck's biggest fan, also has a reason to keep the scrawny little shit alive: Stan's disability and her joblessness don't make ends meet, but when Hen sells some opiods on the side for Tuck the books balance. Like most American households, the wife is the paymaster, so Stan's oblivious to the source of their continued (relative) comfort. Hen sees Brown breaking in the trailer door, fears the worst, and calls the cops.

Now cops aren't, public opinion aside, blind, deaf, and dum-dums. The local deputy, Dan, knows there's mischief being made in Tuck's trailer. He has reason to worry because his only daughter is dating Brown's nephew Nick, and that can't be good for her sobriety. Since Dan's local aristocracy (used to run the local IGA Foodliner, inherited from his daddy), he takes it as a personal affront on all levels that he can't quite prove the reality of illegality going on under his nose. He can, and does, have the place under surveillance, so when Hen's 911 call is radioed out, the response is swift. Not so good for Brown, caught in the act of smacking Tuck around. But no one in Port County doesn't know Brown was a babykiller in Vietnam so they're all scared of him; he's a drunk, so they're scared he'll wow out while sloshed; and his crusade to save his nephew isn't news, either. Sentenced to AA meetings, big whoop.

Nick and Ashley, Dan's daughter, are late to the party at the trailer, finding Tuck gone and the place empty. They decide it's time for them to be big kids about their habit and break into the trailer to steal some supplies. It turns out the supplies are very, very abundant. The plan changes from steal some and use to steal all and set up as dealers. It's Tuck's way of buying really nice stuff for his crappy trailer and they have plans to set up house and get married when they get some money....

What they don't know is that Brown used the AA meeting to make some discoveries and now has Tuck all trussed up in his hunting camp, a place full of Brown's past:

{T}here hung that mirror still. Splotches like mold or something had collected from the corners toward the middle, but Brown was able to see enough of himself in it to feel a fair amount of disgust. No more than the usual amount. He scratched at his chin growth. Did a rat eat your razors? That's what his daddy would say. He wished his chin jutted out more like Clint Eastwood or James Dean or whotheheckever. Instead, you could barely see his chin, it hid so far back against his neck.

The wheels of tragedy are now set in motion. Self-loathing, the need to redeem something from a painfully wasted life, and the sheer revulsion of the strong for the weak cause Brown to plan Tuck's carefully hidden demise. Sadly, Tuck's victims Nick and Ashley have also concluded that Tuck needs taking out; it's sad because, unlike Brown, these two can't bring themselves to do the deed personally, so they turn to Port County's resident no-fail contract killer:

There were a lot of botched kills throughout the eastern part of Kentucky when the work fell outside his control. Six or seven years ago, a man from Perry County was shot point blank in the head and left for dead in the middle of downtown. Problem was, the bullet had traveled between the man's scalp and his skull halfway across his head and exited the same way it had entered on the other side. The whole thing had left him with only fingernail-sized contusions on both sides of his head. He identified the guy who shot him and saw him arrested and convicted of attempted murder.
Now, it's true that a situation like that was a rare one, but part of doing a job right was minimizing the chance for something to go wrong.

The callousness of this internal monologue is courtesy of Fay, an Ulsterman and killer for his side in Ireland. He's known to everyone in the area, and they're more scared of him than of Brown or the law. Good reason to be, after all, since he lives quite nicely on no visible means of support and there's no shortage of disappeared, presumed dead, enemies in Port County. Nick and Ashley decide to hire him to eliminate Tuck while making the mistake of telling Fay how they plan to get the money to pay him.

All hell breaks loose.

Stan's hunting for Tuck. Brown's hunting for Nick and Ashley. Fay's abusing Ashley's mother to get the name of her supplier, Hen. Hen's trying to stop everything from spinning out of control. Dan's sure that if he gets hold of one of these people, he'll unravel the whole mess without any noticeable bloodshed (maybe Tuck dies, oh dear oh well). Fay and Stan and Hen and Brown and Tuck...it's a helluva ride, there are deaths good and bad, and in the end the price owed to the law is paid by Nick and Ashley, who go to prison for possession with the intent to deal narcotics since they stole Tuck's stock.

In the end, Brown's is the one purpose served. Nick comes out of prison early, sober at last. He knows to whom he owes his thanks, the thanks he's too late to deliver:

He's on the school bus and Uncle Wade is standing outside the window. The bus hasn't pulled out yet and Uncle Wade is punching the air and ducking his head and giving him a thumbs up sign and then a big smile. The big smile says do not worry. It says you can do this. ... His smile says a lot and so do his punching hands and his hooked thumbs, and before everything else it can possibly say, it says the thing Nick needs most. The big smile says I love you.

Too late, too late; a job well done by a man ill-used from every quarter.

Sheldon Lee Compton jumps onto my must-buy list with this dizzyingly fast-paced, beautifully choreographed, blood-soaked book. And will someone please tell Norman Reedus that his Oscar-winning role's right here in this book?

KNOCKEMSTIFF by Donald Ray Pollock...reposting 5-star 2010 review

KNOCKEMSTIFF
Donald Ray Pollock
Anchor Books
$16.95 trade paper, $5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this unforgettable work of fiction, Donald Ray Pollock peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place.Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are irresistibly, undeniably real. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.

My Review: Published in 2008, this collection of eighteen interwoven stories about the lives of the men and women and children caught in rural poverty is the first work by Donald Ray Pollock. He lived in Knockemstiff, a real, honest-to-goodness place. He escaped, sort of, by working for thirty years in a nearby town's papermill.

I don't remember who introduced me to the term “hillbilly noir.” Authors like Bonnie Jo Campbell of American Salvage fame as well as Pollock fall into this category of writers who mine the vein of American underclass misery worked so brilliantly by John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell. Noir it certainly is, thematically and in its laconic, almost kabuki play-like, emphasis on grotesque surfaces, implying that every action and every gesture is born out of unfathomable darkness and unbearable pain. The Publishers Weekly review of this collection compares Pollock's work to Winesburg, Ohio. I agree, from a structural point of view, but Sherwood Anderson's grim stories are the comedy stylings of P.G. Wodehouse compared to this collection.

Pollock is brilliantly successful at portraying the...no. Scratch that.

Donald Ray Pollock is brilliant.

I've been bitch-slapped by this writer's ten-inch dick of the imagination. The stories treated me the way those hillbillies treated Ned Beatty in Deliverance. No part of my brain will ever again be clean and unviolated.

There is one story in this collection that, in my humble (!) opinion, doesn't measure up and doesn't belong: “I Start Over,” about a trip through the Dairy Queen drive-through, would be the star turn of any other writer's collection of stories, but here it merely fills up page count and takes the book over 200pp. Left out, no one would notice or feel a lack.

There are two stand-out stories for me, two that should be in high-school literature anthologies and passed from reader to reader with whispered injunctions just to read it, read it: “Schott's Bridge” is the bleak and horrifying story of a young gay man and his fate in this grim, grim world; and “Bactine,” the shortest story in the collection, a quick hit of despair and decline, as two young men escape the present into a futureless fog. They are, in simplest terms, heart-stopping.

But the story that made me hurt the most, though it's not the finest structurally or stylistically, was “Knockemstiff.” Two strangers in a Cadillac convertible, husband and wife, pull into Maude's store for gas, and for the wife to take photos of the “Welcome to Knockemstiff” sign. The husband makes small talk with the clerk, commenting that “[i]t's hard to believe there's people that poor living in this country.” Their condescending words and actions are invisible to them. It's simply inconceivable to these privileged people that others are not, well, envious but impressed by them. They're blind to their cruelty.

I am that California goon, insensitive lout that he is. I've driven through countless places like Knockemstiff in my expensive car, looked out my window, and thought, “No way. This is a movie set. No one lives here, lives like this.” I've stopped for gas, bought a bag of chips, made inconsequential chat with the clerk, wondering the while how he drags himself out of bed to face another day in that kind of place.

I don't want to believe it's true, you see, and I don't like to think that it's not the subject of outrage and outreach and action.

It isn't. Donald Ray Pollock is their voice, these people in the hollers, shouting at us to look, to look, to see the cost of indifference. He's singing an old song. He's doing it well. He's making art, and seducing the susceptible into seeing the invisible, the ignored, the ignoble and unrefined. His artistry is superior. His eye is unerring. His ear is emotional sonar.

Donald Ray Pollock is brilliant.

VOLT: Stories...as jolting as the name implies

VOLT: Stories
Alan Heathcock
Graywolf Press
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A blistering collection of stories from an exhilarating new voice

One man kills another after neither will move his pickup truck from the road. A female sheriff in a flooded town attempts to cover up a murder. When a farmer harvesting a field accidentally runs over his son, his grief sets him off walking, mile after mile. A band of teens bent on destruction runs amok in a deserted town at night. As these men and women lash out at the inscrutable churn of the world around them, they find a grim measure of peace in their solitude. 

Throughout Volt, Alan Heathcock’s stark realism is leavened by a lyric energy that matches the brutality of the surface. And as you move through the wind-lashed landscape of these stories, faint signs of hope appear underfoot. In Volt, the work of a writer who’s hell-bent on wrenching out whatever beauty this savage world has to offer, Heathcock’s tales of lives set afire light up the sky like signal flares touched off in a moment of desperation.

My Review: When reviewing collections, it's hard to know what to say about them whole and entire unless they're linked stories. With a group of stories like this book is, it's easiest and, IMO, best to adopt what I've called “The Bryce Method” in honor of an online friend who introduced me to the technique: A summary opinion, plus a short line or a quote from each story, together with a rating for the story. So as my summary opinion, I offer this: Bleak is not always to be avoided. Sometimes art needs shadows to prove there's light. These stories aren't feel-gooders, and shouldn't be attempted by those in need of uplift. There is none here, but not one of these tough, scrappy folks is gonna lie down and die any time soon. They're too scared of the God they're sure they'll meet on the Other Side.

The stories in book order, faithful as always to the Bryce Method:

The Staying Freight gives new and chilling meaning to “Took a walk, Be back soon.” Why? Coming back is going backwards. Winslow Nettles needs, and needs badly, to go forwards. 3.5 stars

Smoke is a horrible moment in a no-better-than-you man's life, one that changes him forever and not for better. How can one human bear a burden of sin alone? Better, when you're afraid of the god that you've invented, to load some onto an innocent other. Horrifying, and just beautiful. 4.5 stars

Peacekeeper brings justice to a world where there isn't any, courtesy of the local grocery-store manager turned Sheriff. Is lying always wrong? After reading this, you won't think so. A beautiful and thought-provoking modern morality tale, complete with purifying flood. 4 stars

Furlough couldn't be more horrible: A man, not a dumb kid, leads a young woman to the kind of rough justice that makes a civilized person's stomach churn. That he hates it, that it is vile and cruel in his eyes, is probably worse than the resulting nightmare. Spare, elegant, and horrifying. 4 stars

Fort Apache sets the purposeless present and the vacant future against the void inside adolescent souls and the results explode into fire, chaos, and that angst of inchoate longing that humans will do anything to escape. 4.5 stars

The Daughter sets a mother lost to random accident, a daughter whose grief severs her ties to reality wile making the whole world painfully abrasive, and a mother-of-all-storms loose in a cornfield maze. Returning to life, such as it is, is always painful, but it takes the pain of a neighbor's child to turn the daughter's rage outward again. 4 stars

Lazarus is the least successful story, to my mind anyway, but it's still head and shoulders above most anything else I've read this century. When a man is wreathed in the smoke of sacrifices to his vicious god, how can he offer moral guidance? By remaining empty. Then what's needed most, right then and there, can fill you up and come out for who needs it. “It's your song, son...It's not for me to name.” 3 stars

Volt sets the Sheriff, sworn officer of the court, against everything her hometown's about, and against her own ideas of justice instead of the law, as she cooperates with the city cops in bringing a convicted felon/Iraq war veteran in for a court date. 5 stars

...”One world was like it was back home, where folks ate cheeseburgers and kids had sleepovers and ball games and people went to work and got angry over stupid shit that didn't matter. Like their TV ain't no good, or they ain't got the right sneakers. Some shit like that.… But then there's another world, where folks ain't got a goddamn thing, and these motherfuckers'll try any damn thing to blow your ass to dust. Sarge says it was up to us to keep them worlds apart, and if we thought that shit that happened over there wouldn't make it back to some little girl's sleepover then we had our heads full-way up our asses. ...Supposed to rally us, I guess. ...But then I had to go back out that next day and the next and all I come to think on was how I ain't never had no sleepovers or ball games or none of that shit, and didn't none of it make a damn lick of sense.”

Well. There it is. The people who fight for the rights of us all don't have the privileges of us few. And we wonder how come there are so many walking wounded out there screaming their pain with their guns and dancing to the tune of radio mullahs whose hate and bile spewing nonsense feels just like their listeners do inside.

These are beautiful and brave and sad and wrenching demands for anyone with fifteen dollars to spend on a frippery like a book, or with enough luck to live where there's a library, to pay attention.

Ours is not the only world. No oceans separate us from the enemies we've made within.

Book-A-Day #13: A great novel title, HILL WILLIAM

HILL WILLIAM
SCOTT MCCLANAHAN
Tyrant Books
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Beginning to read Hill William is like tuning into a blues station at 4:00 a.m. while driving down the highway. Scott McClanahan's work soars with a brisk and lively plainsong, offering a boisterous peek into a place often passed over in fiction: West Virginia, where coal and heartbreak reign supreme. Hill William testifies to the way place creates and sometimes stifles one's ability to hope. It reads like a Homeric hymn to adventure, to the human comedy's upsets and small downfalls, and revels in its whispers of victory. So grab coffee, beer—whatever gets you through the night—and join Scott around the hearth. Lend him your ear, but be warned: you might not want it back.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt, lucky number 13, asks us to discuss a novel with the best title. I think this is about it.

Now surely y'all remember my review of Crapalachia: A Biography of Place from 2013, right? How I warbled myself hoarse over its 4.5-star glory? Sure! Okay then, go take a quick peek at it and get back in the head of appreciating hillbilly noir or hick lit or whatever we've decided to call it.

And here he is again, Scott McClanahan, to make the fat and oblivious mainstream look, really look, at life among those who don't have much, and that includes hope. This time it's explicitly labeled fiction, so no one's going to run up to McClanahan on stage at a reading and demand to know if Event X happened and when.

Yeah, right.

The reason that's still going to happen is simple: Scott McClanahan inhabits this book the way a djinn inhabits a lamp. He's on your bookshelf. He's lookin' paper-pale, somebody feed the boy some vitamin D-for-decoding! We vivify the writer as we read the writing.

I couldn't stop. I couldn't stop because it felt good.

Just like right now I find myself getting ready to do it.

I hit myself.

I feel the blood surging to my head.

I hit myself.

I feel my jaw tightening.

I hit myself.

It feels like a prayer.

I hit myself.

It feels like something strange.

I hit myself.

It feels like something beautiful.

And that's before the page count gets to double digits. Now, some several of you aren't liking this too terrible much. It's not your favorite thing, it's not going somewhere you're interested in going...yes yes, I get it, it's challenging your definition of entertainment. It did mine, too.

Go on the trip. Yes, it's off your route, past your exit, beyond your slip. Fiction, fact-ion, roman à clef, metafiction, whatever tidy label you need to smack on the package, smack it on and open it up and settle in for an afternoon with someone who doesn't speak Cultured like a native because he isn't.

In a world that celebrates the bland venality of getting and spending, a moment like this...a scant two, maybe three hours' read for most of us serious bookheads...is uncommon and worthy of note and celebration. This isn't bland, and it's less venal than venereal. It won't lull or cosset you, but Hill William (isn't that a great title?) will not send you to bed wondering what you read that day. If anything.

An excellent summer read: CRAPALACHIA by Scott McClanahan

CRAPALACHIA: A Biography of Place
SCOTT MCCLANAHAN
Two Dollar Radio
$12.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: When Scott McClanahan was fourteen he went to live with his Grandma Ruby and his Uncle Nathan, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Crapalachia is a portrait of these formative years, coming-of-age in rural West Virginia.

Peopled by colorful characters and their quirky stories, Crapalachia interweaves oral folklore and area history, providing an ambitious and powerful snapshot of overlooked Americana.

My Review: Memoir...I remember...that's what makes this book so damn good, Scott remembers and he tells us that he remembers, wants us to remember with him. I've never lived in West Virginia, I've only driven through it in my expensive car and thought, "ye gods and little fishes, is this for real?!" and pressed a little harder on the gas to get the fuck out of there. I've never even spent a night there. I drove an extra hour out of my comfort zone (6 hours behind the wheel is enough for me) so I wouldn't have to.

But I remember with Scott McClanahan. I'm 20 years older than he is. I've lived the entirety of my life in upper-middle-class assurance of comfort and joy. When I haven't had any money, I've had friends and loved ones and even random strangers who shared with me. And it never, ever looked like the pictures Scott paints in my head.

It's beautiful, this picture, these pictures, but it's not pretty. It's warty and cold and shaped funny. But oh how much there is to celebrate in the life of a kid who knows where home is and what his family is made of and scoops up the mud he's standing on to make something new of something old.

She hobbled along some more and I walked behind her.
She said: "This is the grave I wanted to see. This is the grave."
I asked: "Whose grave is it?"
I walked in front of the stone and I saw it was her grave. It was the grave of Ruby Irene McClanahan, born 1917 died...
Then there was a blank space--the space where they would put the date of her death.
She touched the shiny stone and explained...her really good deal on the tombstone. She told me I should start saving. It was a good investment.

The tales of this Crapalachian boy are muddled and mixed, of course, as all memories are, and as honest as they are, they aren't always factual. In the appendix to the book, Scott tells us the places he knows he mashed things up and rearranged them, since after all he was writing a story and stories have their own needs. But he never violates, not once in this book, the one Commandment of Memoir: Condescend not, lest ye be caught and pilloried. (See: James Frey.)

I wouldn't write about how people stared at {Uncle Nathan} when I pushed him down the road. They stared and shook their heads....
I knew I would never write about Nathan's light-blue eyes--eyes as blue as Christmas tree lights.
I knew I would never write about his soft heart. The softest heart I have ever known.

I knew he believed in something that none of us ever do anymore. He believed in the nastiest word in the world. He believed in KINDNESS. Please tell me you remember kindness. Please tell me you remember kindness and joy, you cool motherfuckers.

Why read some thirtysomething kid's memoirs? What kind of philosophical point can someone that young make? I wonder, is it even necessary to make a point? Can it be enough to read a book like this, about a young life seen from middle age (can't be much under 35, this kid, and that's spang in the middle of life), and eat the textures and smell the regrets of someone new to the idea that The End applies to him, too? He has children, he tells us so. He tells us that he went from place to place in the world leaving dirt from West Virginia there, giving the dirt to strangers and leaving it in the soil of New York City and Seattle and suchlike. So his children, no matter their wanderings, would have something of their, his, his grandmother's home waiting.

I don't know that I believe him.

"Oh lordie, I'm feeling horrible," she said. Then she clutched her chest. "I'm having chest pains." I kissed her cheek and I said, "I'll see you next week." She told me my grandfather Elgie used to have nightmares begging for the whistle to stop.
She wasn't dying.
She was lonely.

So I left and I heard Ruby shouting again, "Oh lordie, I'm dying." I didn't turn back. I wasn't sure we were even born yet. We were all inside of a giant mother right then and we were waiting to be born. Just like tomorrow, at dawn, we will be held in the arms of a giant mother. We will find warmth and maybe even war there.

I want us all to be ready.

Ready? We're none of us ready, ever. As his kids grow up he'll find that out.

And then there's the story of the little girl and the locket. It's near the end of the book, it's a memory from adulthood. It made me cry for a half-hour, angry and hurting and so so sad, helpless in the face of a world we've made with action, inaction, consent, and indifference (driving faster to escape someone else's reality ring a bell?).

But hey, Scott? I remember. I'm with you.