With this collection of short stories, featuring a shared cast of characters and  set in the nowhere town of Knockemstiff, Southern Ohio, Donald Ray Pollock has made a significant contribution to the American literature of dispossession, small town despair and death. Functioning as a complete antidote to Garrison Keiler’s fictional Lake Wobegone, Knockemstiff is a town in which no-one really wants to stay, but no-one ever manages to leave – and in the meantime, the misery is liberally shared around.

At the front of this book is a map showing the key features of Knockemstiff – the Dynamite Hole, Owl’s Car, the Store, the houses of the benighted inhabitants and so on. It adds an added degree of coherence to this collection. About the only escape any of these characters achieve from the world shown in the map is a chemical one: whether it’s alcohol, weed, lighter fluid or just doughnuts, everyone in Knockemstiff is addicted to something.

In ‘Real Life’ the narrator is Bobby, who lives with his abusive father. Though they are dirt poor, Vernon still lavishes money on new cars, and in this story he decides to teach his son, who he thinks is a weakling and a coward, the correct way to beat a man half to death while they are at the drive-in. The cleverness of this collection is the way that the stories interweave, however loosely, and as well as encountering Bobby again we also find out about the fate of Vernon’s victim and the effect the assault had on him.

In two of the stories, a relationship between one of the town’s many loser men and a mentally ill woman is shown from their two very different perspectives; in ‘Rainy Sunday’, Sharon has not only to content with the mental illness of her husband, but with her tragic, overweight Aunt Joan calling her in the middle of the night and asking for her help in picking up a man – and this being Knockemstiff, the specimen she ends up with is not exactly prime. In ‘Dynamite Hole’, we step back in time to witness a terrible crime and the consequences of the draft on one young Knockemstiff resident.

The interwoven nature of these stories, sometimes overlapping directly, sometimes obliquely, makes Knockemstiff much more compelling, and despite their differing subjects and settings, the different narrative viewpoints, they read as a very coherent and compelling piece of fiction, one that would necessarily require the same kind of creative vision needed to write a novel. This is a very impressive debut, reminiscent of other American small-town tales like Vernon God Little, and an indication to expect more great things from Donald Ray Pollock.

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