A review by chillcox15
Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock

4.0

I read this and Crimes in Southern Indiana, by Frank Bill, in very close vicinity, and they cover much of the same ground -- the dirty, depressing, and devious lives of people who situate themselves in a particular geographic area, an area that the author himself grew up in. In as much, I cannot help but compare the two. I found myself liking this book a little more than Bill's, if for the fact that I felt some of these stories were a little more varied than those in Crimes in Southern Indiana, which I sometimes found to be repetitive. This book got repetitive at points, too (Its most major weakness), where some of the protagonists (drug-addled toothless 20-something hicks) and situations (a high occurrence of hidden or devious homosexuality) appeared a little too often, making some of the stories blend together indistinguishably. That said, I think the area where Donald Ray Pollock really shines is in knowing how absurd to make his stories. They are bleakly realist, after all, but he goes a little bit farther in the predicaments of the characters than Frank Bill does (who often relies on balls-to-the-wall blood-soaked violence to jar his readers into fiction); I particularly enjoyed the body-building story Discipline, which didn't really use the same archetypes the other stories did, as an example of the essential weirdness of the goings-ons in Knockemstiff. Other than that, I found a lot of Pollack's characters to be placed well in the spectrum of sympathetic protagonists to not-so-very-sympathetic; their actions were at times despicable, but he knew where to put enough inner monologues to get his readers to at least understand what might be going on with them. Overall, I would recommend this to the dirty-slice-of-Americana crowd.