Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock
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Book Reviews of Knockemstiff
Book Review: ghastly and beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
I fell in love with them and they made me shudder. That's damn good writing.
Book Review: T.K.O.
Summary: 4 Stars
I grew up in a struggling farming community in Southeast Missouri. My hometown's greatest claim to fame was the day it was listed in Newsweek as the "Meth Capital of America." I don't know if the title still stands, but it wasn't until I slipped away and into the sophisticated nether-regions of the rest of the world that I realized what a stark, bark-and-barley life I'd been raised in.
KNOCKEMSTIFF, a collection of bare-bones stories by newcomer Donald Ray Pollock, brought back home all of the late night drive-arounds, the cloudy sense of life's last end, the heart-knuckling boredom that fills such places, and which can grip at and suck away on your heart just as the dark, clayey mud that fills the fields will grip and suck at your shoes.
You won't make it to the end of the first story -- REAL LIFE -- before it hits you that you're reading something that will leave more than a few papercuts as an impression. The substance is hard to talk about without making the collection sound pie-faced. Say hello to trailer trash, low-rent thieves, incest, lewdness at the laundromat, and enough drugs to make Keith Richards go pale. While the tales are populated by people who think "grammar" is the woman married to "grampa," the heart of every story soars far beyond truncated slang and self-destruction as entertainment.
There are moments where it gets hard to stomach, but only because Pollock is so dismally unforgiving to his characters. And he does such an amazing job of transmitting this ghost town's flat, mindless gloom that you may find yourself blinking against the hard misery of it all. Read about the slow, steady death of a town, and the slow, steady deaths of its citizens. It gets a bit repetitive -- the monotony of the landscape is that visceral -- and sometimes the stubborn lack of hope is a bit grating.
That might just be me railing against my own past, against a childhood surrounded with as many blank-eyed souls, wondering if this kind of snapshot -- perfectly rendered though it may be -- is as important as the topics Pollock adamantly refuses to court: redemption and strength. Pollock's last story, THE FIGHTS, is about the scrabbling obstinancy of life and the people who are borne down and away by it. But the boxers are tired, and leaning close enough to kiss through their sweat and blood. They don't kiss. They just hold each other up and spin. Both, it seems, have lost, but until the bell rings, this is Knockemstiff. Brutal, balletic, bruised.
It hits you, but won't let you drop.
Book Review: good storytelling: gritty and grim
Summary: 4 Stars
You get 18 short stories here in a little over 200 pages. Knockemstiff is an actual town in Ohio, and the author grew up there: you can see a photo or two if you do a Google search. From the stories in the book, you wouldn't think that it could produce a Donald Pollock. The tales are terse, succinct, and portray an unrelentingly grim locale. There doesn't seem to be much hope for any of the residents, or much joy outside of misused prescription drugs, Bactine-sniffing, and booze. Knockemstiff isn't a place you'd like to live within 50 miles of.
The stories take place over many years, with flashbacks to the 1940's, and most of the people appear in more than one story. This has the benefit that even though a tale might introduce a new person or two, the other people and places are already very familiar. What will be unsettling for most readers will be the behavior and activies of the townspeople. Incest, rape, and murder occur at times, but an underlying sense of tension and violence is almost always present. If you like sweet tales of romance, you'd best try some other book: the closest thing here might be a story about a boy and his sister's doll. All in all, it's a grim place and life, and effectively narrated.
There are some other writers this book brings to mind. Cormac McCarthy's Child of God is, in a way, like a full-length novel about one of Knockemstiff's people. McCarthy's Outer Dark and The Orchard Keeper also come to mind. Another similar voice, not as well known as McCarthy, but who should not be missed, is William Gay. Gay's novels The Long Home, Provinces of Night (the title comes from a line in Child of God), and Twilight are excellent, and Gay's book of short stories I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down will remind you of Knockemstiff. Gay's writing is evocative and lyrical, and like Pollock, Gay came to writing late in life. Pollock seems to have a lot of the same talent that Gay does, and both have, no doubt, a lot of similar experiences with a deeply rural life. I think what I'd like to see next from Pollock would be a novel, a novel with Knockemstiff characters, ideally a novel like Gay's dark Long Home or Provinces of Night. Pollock's stories are such that you could see many of them developed into full-length novels: so this is a fine start for a promising writer.
Book Review: Did he just say, what i think he said!?
Summary: 4 Stars
Knockemstiff goes there. It goes places that I never thought a book would, and places that will probably never be visited by a book again. Donald Ray Pollock takes his readers on a journey through the twisted lives of the inhabitants of Knockemstiff, Ohio. A journey they will never forget.
The first thing I liked about this book is that it was told in short stories. For someone with a short attention span like myself, this format worked wonders. There is plenty of action all throughout the book because with 18 stories, comes 18 climaxes. In addition, the short story format allows the reader to feel some accomplishment by allowing them to easily finish at least one story in each sitting. The subject matter of these stories was very much a surprise. If you've heard tales about this book being dirty or disturbing, you don't know the half of it. I was taken aback from the first few pages and never truly regained my footing. But I enjoyed by caught off-guard at the turn of every page. Just when I thought I had heard it all, Pollock pulled something else out of his bag of absurdity.
As crazy as things got, the laid back style of the author made it seem as if the outrageous events were normal happenings in that environment. This style rationalized the characters actions and allowed the reader to actually feel pity for them, despite their grotesqueness.
If you are looking for something different and a book that will make you have to pick up your jaw, Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock is the one for you. Puritans and prudes, stay away.
Book Review: So Good, It' s a Bit Hard to Take
Summary: 4 Stars
Having spent a lot of my youth in an area not unlike Knockemstiff, albeit next door in Indiana, I can definitely say that Pollock captures a people, a mindset, and a time very accurately in most every story in the book. It's so painfully accurate, in fact, that it makes the book hard to read at times.
Like Raymond Carver before him, Pollock gets inside the minds and lives of all too ordinary people who are down on their luck and have been on a generational level for decades. And like Carver, no depression is too deep, no bitterness is too acidic, and no depravity is too disgusting to re-create for the reader here.
Don't get me wrong - Donald Ray Pollock is an exceptional writer, and proves it in every line and paragraph of the book. It's simply that after the first five or six stories, I found that I had to set it aside for a while out of pure self-preservation and read something more positive before picking it back up again. It's not that the book is filled with anger and violence -- it has elements of both -- but more that most of the characters are NOT angry when they commit their violence. They are almost apathetic about rape, killing, and general inhumanity toward others, primarily because they see themselves as victims who are just trying to get by...and see their victims as being in their way.
So is it worth buying? Absolutely. It's a very well written, well thought-out collection of stories. Just do yourself a favor and also pick up something humorous that you can turn to as a mental break at various times as you read it.