Tag Archives: knockemstiff

Short Story Of the Day, Pills by Donald Ray Pollock

Posted on by Bill Chance

While Frankie drove around the township in circles that night, I told him all the secrets in my house, every single rotten thing that my old man had ever done to us. And though, in a stupid way, I felt like a fucking rat the more I blabbed, by the time the sun came up the next morning, it seemed as if all the shame and fear I’d ever carried inside of me was burned away like a pile of dead leaves.

—-Donald Ray Pollock, Pills

 

Design District
Dallas, Texas

A long time ago, I came across a book of short stories called Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock and wrote a blog entry about it.  Not for the faint of heart – these technicolor portraits of misanthropy and hopelessness (a bad and volatile combination) – were quite the read. Now I discover he has, in the intervening decade, wrote two novels, The Heavenly Table and The Devil All the Time. Going to have to add these to my TO BE READ list which is growing ever so longer. So many books, so little time.

In the interim, to tide all of us over, here’s a bit of a disturbing tale available online, from Knockemstiff.

Read it here:

Pills by Donald Ray Pollock

from The Barcelona Review

Donald Ray Pollock website

Donald Ray Pollock’s pest control website (What the hell? I think this is actually put up by the author. Why? Or is there some pest control guy with the same name? I don’t think so) Fun fact from this site: Flies for one reason or another hate Vodka.

Knockemstiff

Posted on by Bill Chance

After I finished Volt I moved right on into another book of short stories set in the gray area between doomed small-town America and the outskirts of hell. This one is called Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock. The eighteen stories take place from the sixties to the nineties and contain a lot of interconnected characters – all living (if you can call it living) in a small Ohio town with the odd name of Knockemstiff. It seems like a stretch of literary license to make up a name like that for a set of stories like this – but the town used to exist. The author actually grew up there. There is even a map in the front of the book – like a trailer park trashy Lord of the Rings. One woman that shows up in several stories has KNOCKEMSTIFF as a tramp-stamp tattoo.

The author says that some of the events in the stories were inspired by stuff he saw – but the real inspiration was the decades he spent as a blue collar worker  – a meatpacking plant and thirty years at a paper mill. After three marriages and four stints in rehab he quit work to write.

The first story, about a boy with a drunken, violent father, who gets the both of them in a nasty fistfight in the concession stand of the Torch Drive-in movie theater during a showing of Godzilla. It was pretty horrific in its details – the kid’s father drinking whiskey from the car’s ashtray and wiping the sweat off his head with a paper bag – but it was well-written and effective and not too over the top.

Now then, though, the second story, Dynamite Hole… well, to say it was over the top is a bit of an understatement. These are not stories for the easily offended or the weak of heart. Dynamite Hole is a true journey to the heart of perversion and hopeless doom. Do not read this book if you don’t have a strong stomach and a good sense of the separation between fact and fiction.

Now, I really liked this book. That does not make me a bad person. This is a fiction, these are lies. Even if the town once existed – this stuff did not really happen like this (I hope). It is a set of horrific tales about the dregs of human scum… all of which somehow end up in the same tiny hamlet – soon to become a well-deserved ghost town. Maybe sharing a read with these folks makes me feel a little bit better about my own flaws… I don’t know. It’s well written, interesting, entertaining – that’s good enough for me.

Even the titles of the stories seem to seep with quiet disaster.

  • Real Life
  • Dynamite Hole
  • Knockemstiff
  • Hair’s Fate
  • Pills
  • Giganthomachy
  • Schott’s Bridge
  • Lard
  • Fish Sticks
  • Bactine
  • Discipline
  • Assailants
  • Rainy Sunday
  • Holler
  • I Start Over
  • Blessed
  • Honolulu
  • The Fights

Minor characters in one story turn out to be the protagonists in another. I thought of going through one more time and making a chart of who was related to whom and who did what and what nasty end they came to. But before I could get started, I decided I didn’t really want to spend that much time with these people… at least not right now.

Despite the deep horrific lives these folks live – the Bactine huffing, the living for years in abandoned cars out in the woods, the tons of stuff I won’t even write them down here – there are moments of hope and redemption. In one of the last stories, Blessed, a father is driving with his family into the city so his wife can sell some blood (he can’t sell any because of the hepatitis). The father’s promising burglary career as a second story man was destroyed when he fell off the roof of a pharmacy in the middle of the night. The little family road trip goes about as horribly wrong as possible. What really bother’s him, though, is the fact that he has come to realize that his son is mute. When they return home, his wife won’t let him back into the house until he cleans up (for well-deserved reasons).

As he peers into the window, he sees and hears his son talking excitedly to his wife, the boy’s mother. He isn’t mute – he only refuses to speak in the presence of his dad. The father takes this as a good sign and determines to go on, as best he can.

Such is life in Knockemstiff.

 Gothic Hillbilly Noir?

Winosburg, Ohio

‘Knockemstiff’ Writer Pulls No Punches

REVIEW OF KNOCKEMSTIFF BY DONALD RAY POLLOCK

The Action of Grace in Territory Held Largely by the Devil

Posted on by Bill Chance

I have been working my way through the stories in Knockemstiff, a collection by Donald Ray Pollock. The characters in the tales are unrelenting losers – it’s harrowing. You would never want to meet these people and shouldn’t care when they meet their inevitable doom. The stories are not for the faint of heart (I’ll write about the book itself in a few days).

Yet, you do care. The stories do work.

In researching the literature I came across a quote from Flannery O’Connor. This make sense, she was a master of the grotesque and the sacrificial outsider. Knockemstiff is in Ohio, not the South of O’Connor’s milieu – but there is a kinship.

The piece I read had a quote:

From my own experience in trying to make stories “work,” I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action that indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace. This is not a piece of knowledge that I consciously put into my stories; it is a discovery that I get out of them. 

And this is it in a nutshell. That’s some of the best advice on fiction I’ve read in a long time.

The quote came from a book, Mystery and Manners – Occasional Prose, Selected and Edited by Sallay and Robert Fitzgerald.

An expanded selection reads:

To insure our sense of mystery, we need a sense of evil which sees the devil as a real spirit who must be made to name himself, and not simply to name himself as vague evil, but to name himself with his specific personality for every occasion. Literature, like virtue, does not thrive in an atmosphere where the devil is not recognized as existing both in himself and as a dramatic necessity for the writer. 

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge. The novelist can no longer reflect a balance from the world he sees around him; instead, he has to try to create one. It is the way of drama that with one stroke the writer has both to mirror and to judge. When such a writer has a freak for his hero, he is not simply showing us what we are, but what we have been and what we could become. His prophet-freak is an image of himself. 

In such a picture, grace, in the theological sense, is not lacking. There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment. 

Story-writers are always talking about what makes a story “work.” From my own experience in trying to make stories “work,” I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action that indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace. This is not a piece of knowledge that I consciously put into my stories; it is a discovery that I get out of them. 

I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil. 

I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject; but it is an added blow.

There is another sentence in there that I had to think about, think about hard….

There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment. 

And there is the lesson for a writer. Even in the most terrible of circumstances and even with the most degenerate of characters there is a moment where grace is offered, and the story happens in the next split second… when the offer is accepted or rejected.

I have been digging through stories that I have read, looking for that moment… and usually finding it.

I have added, right at the top, of the notes I use to develop a story idea, “Where is the grace offered, how is it felt, and why is it accepted or rejected.”

There is always more to be learned. That’s why we get out of bed in the morning.