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Knockemstiff | 
 enlarge | Manufacturer: Doubleday
Category: EBooks
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $7.96 (44%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  45 reviews
Sales Rank: 6358
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
ASIN: B0015KGXE6
Publication Date: March 18, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: A quick Internet search for "Knockemstiff, Ohio" reveals a lazy nexus of shabby houses and dirt roads in southern Ohio, lacking a post office and grocery store, but rich in legends of epic fistfights and swamp-dwelling ghosts. Donald Ray Pollock, a native of this "ghost town," populates his own Knockemstiff with living revenants: huffers, murderers, sex fiends, and their hapless (though not innocent) victims, all tethered to the woebegone "holler" by their own self-inflicted shortcomings and depravities. Pollock pulls no punches--his prose is blunt and visceral, as well as stylish and skilled--and reading these mini grand guignols can be like crunching on a mouthful of your own broken teeth. He resists casting judgment (or sympathy) on his doomed reprobates; predator or prey (or sometimes both), Pollock contemplates his characters with all the warmth of a "frozen bleach bottle." It's an astonishing debut. --Jon Foro
Product Description
In this unforgettable work of fiction, Donald Ray Pollock peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents.
Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are woebegone, baffled and depraved-but irresistibly, undeniably real. Rendered in the American vernacular with vivid imagery and a wry, dark sense of humor, these thwarted and sometimes violent lives jump off the page at the reader with inexorable force. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.
With an artistic instinct honed on the works of Flannery O-Connor and Harry Crews, Pollock offers a powerful work of fiction in the classic American vein. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 40 more reviews...
 Welcome to planet Knockemstiff! September 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I keep hearing and reading that this is a book about Knockemstiff, Ohio, and of course, it literally is. But this is the best kind of book because it transcends geography, demography, socioeconomics. This is a book about human beings.
Chekhov wasn't just writing about Russians, Borges, the Argentines, Virginia Woolf, the plight of a bourgeois existence, Faulkner, the evolving South. No, these men and women were writing about people, regardless of their affiliations. And Donald Ray Pollock has that same brilliant gift: he can pick the right words to speak to all of us, any of us, and that may be the greatest compliment you can give any writer. Pollock can tap a total stranger on the shoulder and whisper truth in our ears.
Read this book! It's a breathing document into our pathos and letdowns and maelstroms of rage and tiny increments of joy. It's our diary, whether we've been to Knockemstiff or not.
Stories better than the one I just read. August 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I recently read a short story. I saw the author's credentials and everything and everything was pretty on the up and up...a master's degree, lots of publishing experience. This particular story was about a guy who followed his animal instincts and wound up in big trouble because of it. He had a sad life and was trying to escape it. He made it worse, inadvertently. Marriage was gone, kids were gone, that kind of thing. He was a loser, is what I'm saying. He lived a loser and died one too. And that was it. I didn't like that story at all, mainly because it lacked that Joyce-ian epiphany quality. That revelation that turned the whole thing. Not that it had to erase the guy's loser-dom. It just didn't provide anything other than information. And that information was here's a loser. That's all.
Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff is a collection of stories about folks that many would call losers. The thing that drew me in about them was that Pollock writes with a compassion that was not present in the example above. That compassion makes this collection extremely compelling. It evoked empathy in me, even against my will, kind of. I found myself going, "I don't want to feel for that guy! But, I do!" That compassion also gives it that particular Joyce-ian quality, that revelation where we the readers have a peek into the interconnectedness of humanity. Pollock really helps the reader see that, even in some of the grimmest physical, mental and spiritual states in which his characters exist. Definitely well worth the read. Brace yourself, because it's pretty messy. But a high recommendation from me.
 Trailer trash elevated to literary fiction August 15, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Depravity doesn't get top billing these days in the world of fiction. But that word fits Pollock's stories, gritty male-oriented fodder, a welcome relief from the dominance of fiction catering to female reader sensibilities. This is trailer trash descending a few notches you didn't think it had, and Pollock has managed not only elevate it to a high art, but has gotten much aclaim for doing so.
No question these stories are tightly written and keep pumping like a hypodermic needle that refuses to leave the vein. However, after I read a few, I was finding it difficult to distinguish them. As a "core" story, Pollock has hit a refreshing bullseye. But as a collection, they kind of miss the mark. Still, it's great to know that "out there' stuff like this is out there.
 lack of range August 12, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Pollock's prose is excellent and often laugh-out-loud funny, but he keeps telling the same story over and over. I have no problem reading about damaged people, but was there a single father in the town who was anything other than an alcoholic bully? Anyone who could get through the day without booze and pills? I kept waiting for that one story that would offer a modicum of redemption, but it never came. Someone compared Pollock to Larry Brown, but Brown's stories have a sliver of hope. All Pollock does is show us these sad souls and leave us to shake our heads.
Great reading and a good argument for guns August 8, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Powerful stuff here! The blackest of black humor leavened with sympathy for the human condition.
Pollock's dazed, doomed, deranged and damned characters huff Bactine and guzzle rotgut, are driven nuts by metal plates in their heads, suffer abusive parents or are abusive parents themselves, pump themselves full of killer steroids, crash cars, rob, rape, beat, get beaten, have heart attacks and strokes, and in general stagger, lost and confused and abused, through miserable ghastly dead-end lives in a bleak trashpit of a town that make the phrase "hell on earth" seem way understated.
This book is a great argument for gun rights -- realizing that people like this probably live just a short drive from any of us makes me glad to have firepower handy.
Strong and distinctive writing brings it all very, very alive. Each story is short and fast-reading and packs a punch -- there's not a loser in the bunch -- and the stories are connected by characters and place in a way that makes this almost as much a novel as a collection of stories.
Pollock reminds me somewhat of, to pick a few of my favorites, Bukowski, Harry Crews, Erkskine Caldwell and Eudora Welty, but he's an original voice who has carved out his own territory. Pollock has written one hell of a book and I hope he writes more.
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