Richard Garn and David Rodriguez take turns taking shots at Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff—or maybe those are garlands they’re passing out. Below, our two reviewers give their take on Pollock’s debut collection of short stories.

A homeless rapist, a woman who carries fish sticks in her purse, a woman who forces her son to roleplay an insane intruder, and a man who pumps his son full of steroids that eventually kill him so that he could be, had he survived, Mr. South Ohio are just a few of the characters you run across in Donald Ray Pollock’s chilling, odd, tragic, and sometimes surprisingly funny debut collection Knockemstiff.

I first ran across this collection after reading a short blurb on it in Entertainment Weekly early in 2008. The blurb had very little to do with the book’s content but instead fetishized the author, calling him an heir to Raymond Carver, some kind of backwoods redneck who had somehow slipped through the backdoor of the literati’s slowly-crumbling ivory tower. Pollock humbly responded to the comparison by saying that it was better than being compared to Danielle Steele. Indeed. But what caught my attention was Pollock’s actual story, how he had started out life as a high school dropout and spent thirty years in a paper mill and driving a truck for a meatpacker, during which time he came up with many of these stories. Pollock, now in his fifties, is currently an MFA student at Ohio State University. Another angle the little blurb took was pointing out how unlike any other coffee house-type MFA student Pollock, no doubt, is. One should hope.

Knockemstiff is more than just a punchy title, it’s the name of Donald Ray Pollock’s real life hometown and the backdrop for the stories found within. In the opening pages, giving the tome a strange Tolkien quality, is a map of the town proper complete with the homes of characters and various points of interest.

The collection comes out swinging from the bell with the first story, “Real Life.” A twelve page story—one of the longer ones, most of the tales are under ten pages—“Real Life” is about the complex relationship between a child, his doting mother, and an abusive alcoholic father. This sets the tone for all of the stories that follow in more ways than one; just about all of the characters are broken and sad like this family, but also every family dynamic throughout has this same quality: drunk, angry father; sad, quiet mother; confused boy in between torn asunder, but leaning toward the father whether he wants to or not. “Real Life” finds the family at a drive-in movie theater, going to see a Godzilla flick. The father drags the son off to the bathroom, really for no apparent reason other than the one he gives which makes very little sense: “I don’t want him pissin’ all over my new seats.” The mother pleads with him not to take their son away, as he had been waiting all summer to see this movie. But his fate is decided; he will not see Godzilla, even though he has been looking so forward to it. Instead, his dad and he get into a fight with another father and son in the bathroom. The boy comes alive, beating the hell out of the other kid. And his father is so proud. To this point all the father has done is belittle his son, but now he wants to celebrate. Fleeing to evade the police, Godzilla is missed, and in euphoria the father screams from the top of his lungs out the car window to the quiet night. His son had done him proud. And the son, as well as the reader, has a hard time knowing how to feel about it.

The stories in Knockemstiff are killer. The biggest problems come when they are tied together as a whole. The first four in the collection, “Real Life,” “Dynamite Hole,” the title story, and “Hair’s Fate” are perhaps the best stories in the book, hooking the reader again and again, dragging us further into the abyss with every hard-hitting, oral tradition line. What follows are fourteen (yes, fourteen) stories that wander around the same neighborhoods as the first four, but for some reason aren’t nearly as memorable. “Fish Sticks” is about the cook who carries old fish sticks. “Giganthomachy” has a woman who asks her son to attack her and hurt her in some kind of understated S&M; ritual. “Discipline” is about the man who kills his son with steroids and then, essentially, himself in an ending that must be read to be fully understood. All of these on their own have the same effect as the first four stories. But that’s precisely the problem: they have the exact same effect as the first four stories. “Lard” and “Honolulu” both have glimmers of brilliance that go beyond the rest, but even they get buried in the collection’s latter…three quarters. I’m reminded of a Tyson fight years ago when he took on Buster Mathis Jr., notable for me only because Mathis is a Grand Rapids, MI hometown boy (this was before we had Floyd Mayweather), and Tyson carried him for two and a half rounds just to prove that his fights were still worth people’s money.

Is Knockemstiff worth the money? I would say that it is. The order might be a little off, but this is a collection best read out of order, when you have time for a ten-page shocker that will leave you feeling as if you went a few rounds with Tyson, carrying you, just waiting for the right time to knock you out. Or…knock you stiff (sorry, but I had to do it eventually). I’m not sure this collection is even meant to be taken as a whole, even though it seems as if Pollock truly wants it to be. Some characters recur, and the first and final stories act as thematic book ends, showing the same characters first in the past, and later in the present. This connectivity comes off a bit thin because the only element these stories are working together on is a dark, twisted invocation of the town itself. And the town has trouble being a main character because, frankly, its denizens outshine it. Knockemstiff, OH is less an American wasteland than some place where those people live.

When Entertainment Weekly compares Pollock to Carver they aren’t far off, but not for the reasons they might have been thinking. There is nothing Chekhovian about these shorts; these are anything but charming slices of middle class life—these are quick, rapid fire pieces that strike like whip cracks. To compare this to Carver would be like comparing Jack Daniels to Kool Aid. Knockemstiff is a setting where Carver would not dare trespass. And if he did, he’d wind up on a milk carton. But Pollock is similar to Carver in one key aspect: much like Carver during his time at the MFA program at Iowa, Pollock, still at Ohio State, could be a major, major American author on the rise.

So check out Knockemstiff. Wander around a bit. Take in a story or two.

But be careful not to overstay your welcome.

Near the heart of Donald Ray Pollock’s dark, gritty, violent tales of small town life in Ohio, the narrator says, “I found myself wishing I had a loved one who would die and leave me their barbiturates, but I couldn’t think of anyone who’d ever loved me that much.”

Perhaps no other sentence in Pollock’s devastating stories states so movingly the plight of the protagonists and their community. Through the eighteen stories in this collection, Pollock builds up a fictionalized version of the real Knockemstiff, Ohio (complete with a map at the beginning of the book) and populates it with a huge cast of degenerates, freaks, fetishists, bactine huffers, bodybuilders, draft dodgers, drug dealers, alcoholics, and the homeless, the obese, the incestuous, and the criminally insane—all of whom share a common dream of escape.

Whether the symbol of escape takes the form of the blood on your knuckles that promises one day you will be strong enough to fight your way out of here, or a stolen pair of panties from a woman whose generosity and decency is something your friends have never known, or the hip-length hair that sets you apart from everyone at school, or the pills that are going to fund your trip to California, or your muscles, or the car that’s been willed to you, or the darts that you fling at the moon, or the touch of a mentally disabled girl who always offers you fish sticks, the yearning to not die in Knockemstiff exists in all these characters, and more often than not is depleted by the end of their stories.

Violence erupts all over Pollock’s town with the suddenness of a Denis Johnson story and the community-wide resonance of Tom Franklin’s Poachers tales. Once Pollock gets in his groove, we’re never relieved of our dread. I’d think it’d be a difficult exercise to tell a group of writers that one character must say, “You’re not gonna screw that, are you?” and then have his friend do something that is even more horrifying than if he had.

This is what happens in “Pills,” the fifth story in the collection and the first where I began to believe that Pollock wasn’t merely a good writer telling Gummo-like stories with technical proficiency, but rather a powerhouse whose extremely quick, nimble plots (the longest of which is fifteen pages) are as immediate and satisfying and riveting and draining as any new short fiction I’ve read in a while.

By the time I got to “Discipline,” in which a father pushes his bodybuilding son to the edge—screaming “South Ohio!” (the bodybuilding title the son is training for) as the boy pukes up the cardboard he’s been eating to try to gain weight—only to watch his son die from overdosing on steroids, I was unable to put the book down. Though the characters are exaggerated, they’re never cartoonish. Motivation is ever-present here, as is the desperation that haunts these characters. At the end of “Discipline,” the father stands in the snow where his son died and waits there all night. The temperature drops to minus thirty-six. As it does, his body (like his son’s) begins to deteriorate. He says, “My muscles ground against each other like ice floes in the cold silence.” Eventually death overcomes him with the tiniest of sensations: a white light, and from that, the feeling of his body shattering. The story ends with, “Then I blew like flakes of dirty snow down the gray, empty street.”

When any of these characters are brought down, the whole community goes down with them. Pollock’s Knockemstiff is banded together in hope and banded together in tragedy. The dreams of each person become dimmer with the failures of their friends and relatives and lovers. I picked this book up because I spent time in a town somewhat like Knockemstiff, and I wanted to see someone capture more than just the Midwest ennui—rather, the feeling of being on a sinking ship, of inevitable failure, of living in a community where no one seems to even be trying anymore to get along. That feeling is here in these stories, but so is the resourcefulness of the townspeople. They dream big, act bold, and sacrifice everything to make it to the Ohio border, and you cannot help but relate to them when they say that love is a gift of barbiturates, because we all want some form of love that will transcend this world we’re trapped in.