Do you like stories about low-lifes? Ah, but how low are you willing to go? If Knockemstiff, the debut book by Donald Ray Pollock, were a contestant at a limbo dance contest, that stick would be no more than six inches above the ground.
Some folks have compared Pollock to Raymond Carver. But the trailer park deadbeats in Carver’s stories look like Parisian sophisticates compared to the characters who populate Knockemstiff.
I could try to introduce them, but it's better to let them introduce themselves.
Here’s a typical set-up for a Pollock story: “I’d been staying out around Massieville with my crippled uncle because I was broke and unwanted everywhere else, and I spent most of my days changing his slop bucket and sticking fresh cigarettes in his smoke hole.... [I’d been] huffing several cans of Bactine, and then I was sick, and my brain felt like a frozen bleach bottle.”
Or how about this touching vignette? “By the end of the fifth day, we were fried. Now the speed was like water running through our veins, and we couldn’t get off any more. Our throats had turned to leather from cigarettes and talk; our gums bled and our jaws ached from grinding our teeth together. Frankie kept whispering to a beer can that he held in his hand like a microphone, and I had struggled off and on all that day to convince myself that it wasn’t talking back to him.”
Here’s another typical interlude: “Some ugly bastard named Tex Colburn caught me in the Paint Creek bottoms picking through a patch of buds that he’d been planning on ripping off himself. By the time he ran me down in that cornfield, he was so pissed that he had his boys hold me while he chipped my front teeth out one by one with a spike nail he pulled out of a rotten fence post.”
And, yes, there are ladies in Knockemstiff: “And even though she was probably the best woman Del Murray had ever been with -- gobs of bare-knuckle sex, the latest psychotropic drugs, a government check -- he was still embarrassed to be seen with her in public. Anyone who’s ever dated a retard will understand what he was up against.”
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