'Knockemstiff' by Donald Ray Pollock

Stories

Donald Ray Pollock

Doubleday: 206 pp., $22.95

"KNOCKEMSTIFF" is a powerful, remarkable, exceptional book that is very hard to read. Donald Ray Pollock's first collection of stories is dark, twisted, stuffed like the back seat of an old car with stained clothing, ugly sex and too many drugs. Pollock grew up here, in the real town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, which appears on MapQuest.com as the intersection of two skinny roads in the middle of a mostly blank page. As Pollock describes it, it's less than a town -- just a dip in the landscape, where the policemen "wouldn't even climb out of the cruiser anymore, just turned on the flashing light as they sped on through the holler." Every store has closed, except for one small market and a rundown bar. The stink from the paper mill in Chillicothe permeates. Pollock's characters live in a rusted, broken trailer or an abandoned school bus or a house with a hole in the floor instead of a toilet. They drink, pop pills, snort Bactine, fire up the crack pipe, fight over steroids or bologna sandwiches. The women will get in the back seat for almost anybody. The fathers are all disappointed, and every child is just one smart-aleck remark away from permanent disability:

"The old man walked in a circle around Daniel, scratching his chin and looking the boy over as if he were a prize shoat at the county fair. Finally he stopped and pronounced, 'You need you a . . . haircut, boy.'

"Daniel, his heart sinking like a stone, took a deep breath and resigned himself to the scissors his mom kept in the kitchen drawer. But then, in a surprise move, the old man whipped out the long knife instead and shoved his son down in a chair. . . .

"It was like being in the electric chair, Daniel would think later, though without the pleasure of dying, or even a last meal. But with specks of his blood splattered all over the corn bread, and hair floating in the soup beans, who was hungry anyway?"

Pollock knows this terrain. He dropped out of high school and worked at the paper mill for 32 years. He knows these people, what they want and think and feel, and he takes us there without flinching. Broken noses, missing teeth, bowels that let loose in Wal-Mart. Sharon, who pimps for her fat Aunt Joan. A mother who wants her son to pretend to murder her, night after night. In clear, direct prose written in the vernacular of the place, he manages to transcend the scum, revealing the beauty in these unhappy lives: "The wind picked up, rocking the old car back and forth. Flakes of snow blew through the cracks and swirled above me. Reaching down, I picked up the tiny skull of a wretched little bird. I held it in my hand for a long time. It seemed as if everything I'd ever done in my life, the good and the bad, rested there. Then I slipped it, as thin and fragile as an egg, into my mouth."