Pollock manages to refrain from both judgment and sentimentality, allowing the exact amount of grace necessary to keep his stories honest and, almost miraculously, free of cynicism. The Times did note, however, that while Anderson’s characters’ depravity was hidden beneath socially acceptable veneers, Pollock’s characters “wear their grotesqueness high up on their sleeves.” Knockemstiff features addicts of many kinds, drunks, kidnappers, prostitutes, child molesters, wife beaters, child beaters, and a mother who makes her son act out sexual fantasies in which he pretends to be the mass murderer Richard Speck. But Pollock’s voice is so assured and his vision so precise (and his humor so black) that critics couldn’t help but praise the book as a minor masterpiece.Įven The New York Times weighed in, comparing the collection favorably to another Midwestern story cycle, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Its eighteen stories feature a cast of characters so unseemly and depraved, so lacking in common sense or decency, that the book was sure to sell a few copies to a few weirdoes and be forgotten. It seemed unlikely that Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection, Knockemstiff, published in 2008, would cause much fuss in the literary world.
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