Now, as I write of the remaining tales, I will spare you the detailed analysis I’ve provided here, and only summarize plots, and give you the three or four most egregious examples of bad writing. The second tale is called "Dynamite Hole" - a play off a location and female genitalia. In short, a homeless voyeur watches a brother and sister nakedly and incestuously copulate in an open field until he decided to kill them. The fornicators scream, ‘Jesus save me,’ as they do the deed, a phrase that the murderer ends the tale with - surprise, surprise. Here’s the fact - if I told you that a tale featured incestors who screamt something in climax, and that their killer would utter something at tale’s end, how many of you would not guess that the thing uttered by the killer would be what the incestors’ uttered? Exactly.

The third tale is the titular one, "Knockemstiff," the name of the Ohio burg where all the tales are set. In it, a passerby takes a photo of a loser and the gal he lusts for, who is leaving town for parts unknown. It’s the best of the three tales, thus far, but larded, again, with far too much pointless description of the outer world, and nothing of the perceptual world of the narrator. "Hair’s Fate" follows a runaway boy who masturbates on his sister’s doll. He is picked up by a gay trucker (what other kind are there in stories like this?) and the tale ends right before the moment of sodomy. The ending of this story is known the minute the trucker appears.

"Pills" is about druggies - the truth is that, now, a few days after having read the story, I barely recall it, save that it suffered from all the above mentioned flaws, and it’s inanely ‘precious’ ending: ‘Looking up, I saw the red blinking lights of an airliner, miles above me, heading west. I’d never been on a plane, never been out of Ohio for that matter, but I imagined big-shot bastards on vacation, movie stars with beautiful lives. I wondered if they could see the glow of Frankie’s fire [a dead, unplucked chicken] from up there. I wondered what they would think of us.’ Given all the talk, this Presidential election year, and whether or not the candidates are too elitist and tied to the two coasts, this naked plea for the worth of ‘flyover states’ is strained to the breaking point, especially since Pollock plays up every cliché that reinforces said characterizations. Enough said.

"Gigantomachy" is about a son who sexually thrills his mother by threatening her while playing the part of her favorite serial killer. This is no longer, technically, grotesque, nor even absurdity, but sheer silliness. "Schott’s Bridge" follows some losers who have sex with an old woman and contemplate suicide. Why? Because they are losers. There is no reason for such characters nor such a tale. It is, again, just silly, and ill wrought. "Lard" follows more losers, in fact, they are such losers that they even refer to a guy who might lose his virginity as bustin’ his cherry, even though that expression is only applicable to the female sex, i.e., the hymen. I won’t even bother you with the pointless plot. Simply bear in mind all the flaws mentioned earlier, recall the misapplied sexual metaphor, and read this last sentence: ‘He kept throwing them [darts], as hard as he could, until they had all disappeared into the darkness that surrounded him.’ Ooh, ain’t you scared of the dark? Apparently Pollock is not content with aping the vapidity and bad dialogue of the Dave Eggers/James Frey/David Foster Wallace crowd, but feels a need to rival TC Boyle and Joyce Carol Oates in the trite ending department, as well.