Tales of the Battleground State of Ohio, Part Three

I've been blogging about the powerful short story collection "Knockemstiff" by
Donald Ray Pollock.

As I mentioned, this is an amazing compilation, but it's crafted only in the darkest hues of human behavior.  Many of the stories involve children, and I can't recall a single parent that you'd call admirable.  Generally, the fathers are drunk and abusive, and the mothers are beaten into submission by their husbands.  Even single mothers don't get to be admirable: the single mother in the story "Giganthomachy" seems to be inciting her only son to have sex with her (although it hasn't happened by the end of the story).  I don't even have a name for her psychopathology.

All the stories take place, wholly or partially, in or near the rural Ohio town of Knockemstiff.  The author has generously included a hand-drawn map.  There are 37 houses, bridges, stores and other landmarks drawn on the map.

For no good reason, I wondered if I could correlate the perversions, abuses, and bad behavior in the collection with the 37 images on the map.  In other words, are there 37 perversions in these 18 stories?  And, if so, could I match them up with the 37 locations on the map? (Gay-bashing at Todd's Fish Camp!  Incest at the Dynamite Hole!)

The answer: not even close.  By my count, I went past 37 before I got halfway through the book.

In the second story alone, there is: incest between underage children, homelessness, blasphemy of a sort I'd never imagined, a peeping Tom, severely disturbed war veterans, trapping a man and killing him via poisonous snakes, rape and child murder!  Oh, and a man mimes a sexual encounter by holding a dead copperhead to his face and kissing it.  All this in a 10 page story!  (One of the best stories in the collection, by the way.)

So "Knockemstiff" is not for the faint of heart.  But it is a hell of a collection.

Tales of the Battleground State of Ohio, Part Two

To continue:  I was absolutely gobsmacked by the first few stores in Donald Ray Pollock's collection "Knockemstiff."  The first story, "Real Life," opens like this:

My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old.  It was the only thing he was ever any good at.

Pow!  Now THAT is a great pair of opening lines.  They not only make you want to read the story, they make you want to read everything Donald Ray Pollock has written!

And, if you're a writer like me, it makes you want to give up writing.  Why bother?  Donald Ray Pollock has already done it better than you ever will.

The next story is great, too.  But if the characters are anti-social in the first story, those in the second story are absolutely depraved.  If they were real-life characters instead of fictional, a psychiatry student could write his or her dissertation on them.

But...

It keeps going on.  In every story, almost every character is on drugs or abuses alcohol or engaged in criminal acts or perverted - or a combination of the above.   Only outsiders have any money.  Everyone in the town of Knockemstiff is barely getting by or homeless.

Eventually, you realize that Pollock is painting with a limited palette.  There's no joy in Knockemstiff.  The closest to pleasure these characters experience is sex or the oblivion of drugs.  It's like a genre without a name.  Call it Literary Noir.  (Most of the stories originally appeared in small literary journals, like Sou'wester or Third Coast or the Berkeley Fiction Review.)

And that realization is what got me out of my funk.  Yes, Donald Ray Pollock is an amazing writer.  Maybe I'll never be as good as he is.  But he doesn't write humor, or travel, or about people who aren't one step away from destitution.  I do.  There's room for both of us in this world.

Tales of the Battleground State of Ohio, Part One

The big election is over, and once again pundits claimed that the road to victory went though the state of Ohio.

Now, I've been to Ohio many times.  I know people from Ohio.  But lately, my view of Ohio is colored by a collection of short stories by Donald Ray Pollock.  The collection is called "Knockemstiff," which is the actual name of a rural town in Ohio.

To my fellow writers: did you ever read something so good, so powerful, so well-written, that you wanted to give up writing?  That's how I felt when I read the first two stories in "Knockemstiff."

I won't give it all away, but bad things happen in "Knockemstiff."  Very bad things.

And if these stories are truly representative of Ohio, and our election hinges on Ohio...well, all I can say is, we're in trouble.

More tomorrow.