The final tale in the book is "The Fights," wherein the young kid from the very first tale, "Real Life," is all grown up, and thirtysomthing years later, is- you got it, a petty thief, alcoholic, and loser, who has nothing for contempt for his dying dad, reduced to watching television boxing with the speaker’s loser brother. Without even detailing the tale’s plot, the end is already doubly bad- for it is predictable that such a work would naturally go circular, and pick up the opening tale’s losers, and the tale itself follows the book’s execrable pattern of portraying outrageous losers as if the norm. The third predictable and trite thing it offers is this, the story’s and book’s final scene, again, seen coming from within the first page of the tale: ‘He (the dad) took a deep breath, and I took one with him. The TV light brightened and then dimmed. Tossing my cigarette in the grass, I turned and started toward my car/ The fight was nearly over.’ At this point, one actually hopes the dope will suicide, but he won’t. He will, like all of Pollock’s anorexically sketched characters, just reappear in an even worse tale in a future book- likely the supposed novel about a serial killer Pollock is penning. Hey, I heard that groan!

All in all, the book rates about a 40 out of 100, with the second half a little bit better than the first, a 50 vs. a 30 of 100. That’s because three or four of the later tales have a brief moment where a good writer may have salvaged the tale into something passable, but where the rote, banal, and formulaic Pollock simply can only let his ragged tale’s inertia draw him to the most obvious ends. Also, there are a few minor hints that Pollock might be capable of learning something of story structure, or even have some rudimentary impulses that go beyond the predictable in these later tales. Yet, it’s so fleeting, for the book never coheres as a work of singularity nor substance, never establishes a rationale, beyond its location, and, amazingly, Pollock is so damned clueless as to how bad his book is, and how ludicrous his tales are, that in the book’s Acknowledgments, he types this:

First, I’d like to say that, though the stories in this book were inspired by a real place, Knockemstiff, Ohio, all the characters are fictional. I grew up in the holler, and my family and our neighbors were good people who never hesitated to help someone in a time of need.

What is amazing is that Pollock actually seems to believe that anyone who is not retarded would think that there’s a semblance of reality in these puerile stories meant to titillate a twelve year old, presumably because in interviews of his own life, he was a moronic druggy working class loser like they are (shocking, eh?). In fact, Knockemstiff is not even a real place any longer, but a ghost town. It’s enough to make one believe that there might be something more than meets the eye here, that all the bullshit praise from the idiotic critics were just evidence that this was some sort of grand literary hoax, like the Araki Yasusada Hoax perpetrated on the American Poetry Review in the mid-1990s, or the Ern Malley Hoax that befuddled mid-20th Century Australia. But, alack, not. Pollock is all too depressingly real as a representative of all that is wrong with published fiction today - a bad and generic writer (although, to be fair, he is a better writer than Dave Eggers or James Frey, and just a notch below TC Boyle) who gets published because of connections and the blurbery of a bad, but celebrated, writer, and then gets a plethora of Amazon ‘buzz reviews’ from friends.