One of the most reliable tipoffs to the fact of a writer’s not being of high quality is when he is overpraised, and overpraised in a way that stresses nothing of a literary nature, usually by a published writer who lacks any skills of his own. Such was reinforced to me upon reading the new collection of short stories by first time writer Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff.

Now, wait a minute, you say. Isn’t it true that agents and editors always bemoan the fact that the publishing world is so ‘competitive,’ especially in regards to there being no market for short fiction? Of course, all of this goes out the window when a writer gets a blurb from a known writer; in this case, the hack’s hack, (Up)Chuck Palahniuk, the man who brought you that literary marvel, Fight Club. The Chuckster effuses on the dust jacket: ‘Donald Ray Pollock gives us the impossible - fast, funny stories about the saddest people you’ll ever meet in fiction ... more engaging than any new fiction in years.’

Need I really state that none of this is true? Let me give some more gushings. From the New York Times, whose review’s title is Winosburg, Ohio; a play off of Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg Ohio, save for the fact that Anderson was a very good writer, while Pollock is an anonymous MFA hack with little talent:

But whereas Anderson tucked the grotesque beneath the staid and steady public lives of his characters, doctors and other professional types among them, Pollock’s characters — addicts, runaways, squatters, rapists, aspiring molesters, many of them one signature away from internment in “the group home” — wear their grotesqueness high up on their sleeves. If Winesburg’s social constructs held the unutterable hungers of its citizenry in check, however loosely, in “Knockemstiff” there are no such constructs.

In fact, like most wannabe ‘realistic’ fiction, the only way Pollock can grasp at reality is by painting the lowest common denominator as the norm. Almost everyone is a sex, alcohol, or drug addict, and almost all of them are illiterate or semi-literate. The shadow of Raymond Carver is so huge in Pollock, yet so utterly shadow with none of the man, that the fact that so many critics go out of their way to claim Pollock is not like Carver is a dead giveaway that he is a talentless aper of the dead storyteller. The Dayton Daily News writes:

In Pollock's fanciful imagination, this hardscrabble swath of Appalachia in south central Ohio is gritty and nasty and downright terrifying. His version of Knockemstiff is peopled by losers. Druggies, grifters, rapists, thieves, perverts, killers - every manner of dead-end situation ricochets across these pages with the lethal force of flaming cars skittering toward that looming abutment. No happy endings should be expected.

These stories detonate. Pollock's readers become horrified spectators of tragedy and disaster. We are mortified by the violence yet, strangely thrilled. There is that sense of being a voyeur observing repulsive but fascinating behavior. Pollock writes with incendiary verbal pyromania.