SHORT STORIES: The Outlaw AlbumBy Daniel Woodrell, Sceptre, 167pp. £16.99
NOTHING IS ALL that easy for any of the characters in the wonderful, savage narratives of the Ozark-born and -based writer Daniel Woodrell – nothing except, perhaps, killing, and killing is something that happens throughout. There is some regret, but most of all there is recognition, particularly of the moment a life is changed and invariably destroyed. Woodrell does not deal in possibilities; he deals only in aftermaths. “If they ever catch who took my daughter, I’ll probably know him. Maybe I’ve known him all my life . . . ”
All of these stories are strong, even the shortened version of Woe to Live On, previously published as a period novel. But Florianne, a father's lamentation, is remarkable even by Woodrell's soaring standards. "At the opening of each deer season I hope this time she'll be found. Eleven hunts have come and gone now, and others have been stumbled across in culverts, under old plywood, wrapped carefully in white sheets, and piled over with leaves, but not my girl."
It takes a second to realise the narrator is acknowledging that abductions and murders happen and happened to him. His daughter was mowing local lawns and simply disappeared. The father’s numb tone of amazed wonder is beautifully sustained; it is obvious how many times he has reviewed the facts.
He recalls her mother, who “ran west when the girl was five”. It turns out that his daughter had been fat, but then she went on a diet, and the better she looked the greater the danger. There is a chilling logic to his question: “If she had stayed chunky would she be here now?”
The tremendous opening story, The Echo of Neighbouring Bones, begins: "Once Boshell finally killed his neighbour he couldn't seem to quit killing him." The dead man, "an opinionated foreigner from Minnesota", is guilty of a serious offence – he killed Boshell's wife's dog – and must pay.
Elsewhere, in Twin Forks,Morrow moves down from Nebraska, "escaping fresh memories by chasing after old ones", and sets up in a little camping and canoe-hire business. He quickly learns all about his unforgiving new world.
In another story a young girl refers to her baby who weighs 200lb and sits in a wheelchair. “He can’t talk since his head got hurt, which I did to him . . . Before Uncle became my baby, when he was a man, myself and Ma both tried never to be alone inside with him . . . as he was born with a pair of devils in his chest.”
The language is biblical, oddly formal. “The cow had wide screaming eyes that were saying things,” notes a disturbed narrator who lives with his dying mother, “that living things say to me in that language better than words.” No one seems quite normal; they have seen too much, witnessed sights that leave one damaged beyond belief or simply immune to horror. “My brother left no footprints as he fled,” sounds like the opening line of a poem, and in a way it is: the narrator watches as his brother sets off to give their dying father one final enduring pleasure: a clear view of the river. In order to achieve this, a neighbour’s new house must be burned to the ground.
A collection such as this leaves one thinking about the impact landscape can exert on a writer’s imagination. Woodrell’s vision is more rooted in a sense of place than in the place itself, although there is no denying the raw pull of the Missouri Ozark region as it borders Arkansas and reaches towards Tennessee.
His stories are touched by Southern Gothic, and he shares the black humour of Flannery O'Connor. In Two Thingsan official caller to the narrator's homestead makes her way towards the house. "I have posted myself in the yard," reports the narrator, "and she comes straight at me smiling. Over her shoulder is a strap that holds up a big purse made of the sort of pale weeds they have in native lands I never saw." This visitor believes that the narrator's son is a gifted poet. Father remains wary: "Tell me do this somehow line him up early for parole?" Nothing the prison teacher can say will change the narrator/father's opinion of his son: "If I love Cecil now it is like the way I love the Korean conflict. Something terrible I lived through."
Within weeks of the arrival of Ron Rash's Burning Bright, another outstanding US short-fiction collection – and winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award – comes this assertive first volume from Woodrell, who, although five of his eight novels were selected as New York Timesnotable books of the year, had never been deservedly celebrated.
Even his finest work to date, Winter's Bone, an eerie quest in which a young girl tracks down her bail-jumping father (and which was one of my books of 2006), seemed destined to be merely admired. But never underestimate the power of film. Just as Russell Banks's superb novel Affliction(1989) was made into a fine movie, so too did Debra Granik's screen version of Winter's Bone, from last year, gather four Academy Award nominations. Slowly but surely Woodrell has been celebrated.
Night Standdescribes how a man is woken in his bed by a naked intruder who is growling at him. Both of them have served their country, one in Vietnam, the other in Iraq. The story is about far more than the action taken by the man surprised from sleep: it is about being trained to kill.
Exactly how supremely gifted is Daniel Woodrell? Read these stories and agree that he is yet another American original with an uncanny feel for language and the menace of a world in overdrive.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
