Reviews

The first story in this collection, “The Pedersen Kid,” is phenomenal. A gripping, suspenseful story of a child found nearly frozen in a snowstorm. Perhaps the bar was set too high with this one as none of the others quite lived up to it, although each had some memorable moments and was well executed. They depict characters in rural life, typically poor, and perhaps driven mad by the weather (or just midwest life). The final eponymous story takes more of an avant-garde style and is probably better than I am recalling it, so I might reread that one. This is the only Gass I’ve read so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I found it a bit of a mixed bag with some really strong highlights.

joeduncan's review against another edition

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There's a good mixture here. Pederson kid is straight gothic lit and brutal. The other pieces are shorter and brainier, but still pretty straightforward. As an ex-Indiana boy, the title piece was my favorite and the least narrative-centric of the bunch.

jayden_mccomiskie's review against another edition

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4.0

Very good. Here's my favourite quote:

“it’s not surprising that the novelists of the slums, the cities, and the crowds, should find that sex is but a scratch to ease a tickle, that we’re most human when we’re sitting on the john, and that the justest image of our life is in full passage through the plumbing.”

reallivejim's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

4.5

halibut's review

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5.0

The writing in each story feels like an attempt to capture a single character's experience of the locations they find themselves in. At points percetion feels crisp, like the clipped unmarked dialogue in The Pedersen Kid, but can switch rapidly to a more jumbled circular interiority. Most of the stories feature houses or homes pretty prominently, there's a sense of characters both rattling isolated around both these places and their thoughts.

mnkk's review

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challenging dark reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Diverse cast of characters? No

5.0

highestiqinfresno's review

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4.0

A front-heavy collection from one of the masters of modern writing. Gass has an incredible eye for detail and the ability to use precise language to translate the banal into the sublime. The two winners here are "The Pederson Kid" and "Mrs. Mean" two very different stories that use an unreliable alienated narrator to observe midwestern life. The Pederson Kid is an almost horror story of a mysterious child found frozen in the upper midwest, which slowly morphs into a surreal meditation on oedipal hatred set against the unforgiving backdrop of a blizzard. Mrs. Mean, by contrast, is a Lynchian dissection of a neighborhood from the perspective of an alienated (shut-in?) resident. Gass's writing sparkles here as he infuses magic into the mundane of suburban life.

The rest of the book is merely ok, but the brilliance of the first two stories makes it worth exploring.

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