This is a real town, or rather a collection of decrepit shacks and trailers, in southern Ohio, just SW of Chilichothe, maybe 70 miles straight south of Columbus (home of THE Ohio State University) and probably a half hour north of Portsmouth, which sits on the Ohio River. Yes, it really does exist even though this is entirely fiction.
Pollock has assembled a series of interconnected short stories about the people who live in and around Knockemstiff, a place where “the hillbillies wouldn’t watch a TV show that had blacks on it.” Best I can tell, it begins in the 50s or 60s and runs up to about the 1990s, but the presentation is not chronological, nor does it need to be.
We open up a recount of Vern, a loud, uncouth papermill worker, his wife and 7 yo son Bobby at a drive-in theater. This is where Bobby sees his dad pick a fight in the canteen can with some bigger guy and damn near kill him right there in the toilet. The vic’s son, older than Bobby, tries to intervene and Bobby does his level best to keep the other kid out of the melee. On the way back to the car, Vern says to Bobby “You did good.” Bobby would remember this as “the only goddamn thing my old man said to me that I didn’t try to forget.”
Pollock then takes us through random acts of the locals. Like the 15yo kid who wanders along a creek, witnesses incest between neighbors slightly younger than he, decides he wants in, whacks the kid, takes the girl, drowns her, stuffs them in a small cave, and continues on with his life.
Those are just 2 of the 18 stories in this book. Characters go in and out of the tales, but each chapter is an end unto itself. Considering the behavior and actions of the locals, one would think that the inbreeding comes from the same tree that doesn’t branch. These people are some of the lowest, most degenerate, disgusting, dirty, mean, criminal people on the planet. They eat the 4 primary food groups: processed cheese, toast, baloney, fish sticks followed with a dessert of Oxy washed down with anything liquid that is handy. And if it isn’t Oxy, they might be sniffing Bactine from a plastic bag.
“Forgetting our lives might be the best we can do” sort of sums up what each of the characters do with their time. They all seem to “crave junk food the way a baby craves a tit.” And it’s not just the characters that seem to have risen out of the brine of the earth’s belly because “the damp gray sky covered southern Ohio like the skin on a corpse.”
As the decades pass, the locals fall prey to their own misdeeds like the guy with the metal plate in his head, the kid who sniffed too much junk and now does little more than scratch at his scalp, the 2 teenagers who keep trying to get a third laid (so he would be constantly berated by his dad for being a virgin), Vern has had 3 heart attacks and sits stuck to his fake leather easy chair, some grandfather who is still reliving Korea but refuses to wear adult diapers. One slowly decaying slug has an epiphany of sorts when he realizes, “that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”
Pollock apparently grew up in the region and worked the paper mill and other hard labor jobs, but has worked his way into an MFA program in creative writing at Ohio University in nearby Athens (full disclosure: I have degrees from both Ohio U and THE Ohio State University). One would have to consider that if the author gets high praise from Chuck Palahniuk that it would have to be pretty strange . . . and addicting . . . but still very strange.
So, should one willingly choose to pick up a book about desperate souls whose only glimpse of hope is tied up in movie mags who shiver in a nothing town of tilted trailers and abandoned cars hard by the dump, who get so sick from eating real food that they have the squirts in an alley only to get humiliated by local cops, all for some Oxy stolen from a nursing home? Only if you are afraid of being drawn into this sometimes violent and downright shitty world where Robert Earle Keen’s ‘Merry Christmas From The Family’ could be the God’s honest truth. If so, you might be missing one of the more literate presentations of (yes, I’ll say it) literature based in “a place people had grown up in, but never felt like home.”
East Coast Don
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