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"Knockemstiff," by Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday, 206 pages, $23).
Donald Ray Pollock grew up 13 miles southwest of Chillicothe in the holler known as Knockemstiff, Ross County, Ohio. He spent 32 years toiling in the paper mills at Chillicothe. He really wanted to be a writer. Dreams can come true.
Pollock has written 18 short stories about Knockemstiff. The actual community has faded away. You would never know that from reading Pollock's literary debut, a collection aptly called "Knockemstiff."
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.
The first story, "Real Life," sets the tone for what is to come. A boy remembers. "My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was 7 years old. It was the only thing he was ever any good at."
Most of these stories seethe with an undercurrent of violence. Many of the characters are hopeless, ignorant or cruel. In "Hair's Fate" a sad youth named Daniel reflects that "when people in town said inbred, what they really meant was lonely. Daniel liked to pretend that anyway. He needed the long hair. Without it, he was nothing but a creepy country stooge from Knockemstiff, Ohio."
Pollock's hillbilly ne'er-do-wells will strike some readers as politically incorrect stereotypes. If you are offended by prose that punches you right in the nose, you should avoid this book. Deeply unhappy people take drugs and abuse each other in this tortured fiction. "Daniel tried to laugh, but that had always been too hard for him. He'd never had anything to celebrate, not once in his whole life."
The tale "Pills" descends into darkness. "Wanda tended bar at Hap's and sold the black beauties on the side. The hilljacks loved them because a three-dollar capsule made it possible to drink four times as much and still miss the telephone poles on the way home."
Speed kills. Some guys don't miss the poles. "Knockemstiff" is populated by the damaged specimens who crashed through windshields and survived. Another unlucky fellow becomes a vegetable after a drug binge. The unfortunate caretakers of these sad cases are driven to their own extremes of behavior.
One character carries fish sticks around in her purse. Another overdoses on steroids trying to win a bodybuilding title, Mr. South Ohio. The freak show that is "Knockemstiff" unspools with brutal precision. Donald Ray Pollock is a keen observer of the human condition. This is a fantastic debut.
Book reviewer Vick Mickunas blogs daily about books at www.DaytonDailyNews.com/booknook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 4/8/08; 12:20:25 PM
from the dept.
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