Chloe's Reviews > The Outlaw Album

Daniel Woodrell is an author gifted with extraordinary descriptive talents and an imagination so dark and murky I would not want to go wading through too deeply lest I end up a meal for the alligators and snakes that surely flourish in such conditions. It shouldn't be as easy as it is for him to call to life the haunting beauty of the forests and rivers of wild Appalachia while at the same time people it with characters for whom complete and spontaneous violent outbursts are always an acceptable method of conflict resolution. Whether you're bashing your rapist Uncle over the head with a log or driving your car over a cliff while attempting to run over a hitchhiker, you fit in well in Woodrell's world.

These short stories are not all bloodlust and Southern-fried violence, however. Into the mix, Woodrell scatters some of those bittersweet moments of earnestness that made Winter's Bone such a compelling read and make Woodrell's debt to Cormac McCarthy all the more obvious. Two offerings in particular stand out among this collection. The first, "Black Step", is a painful tale of alienation and hurt as it recounts a recently-returned-from-Iraq veteran taking care of his ailing mother's farm while also coping with his PTSD and emotionally-shallow friends whose version of commiseration is finding out how people's heads look when they explode. The next, "Woe To Live On", is the stand-out winner in this collection. Set in the early days of WWI it features an elderly wood-carver who had served as a bushwhacker during Reconstruction, ambushing and killing Union troops intent on pacifying the still-roiling South, dealing with moving into a new global era and the changing American worldview. I think this story should be required reading for Tea Partiers, but doubt most would get the point.

Making for an entertaining afternoon of reading, this is a short and quick collection of stories that I could not put down once starting to read. Each surprising twist ending propelled me further, I needed to see what would happen next. Next thing I knew I had torn through the meager 167 pages and wanted more. Some of these stories are clear throw aways, writing exercises that probably should have stayed on his hard drive rather than being used to pad this collection, but which are still entertaining. I'm uncertain whether most of these tales will stay with me as I move on to other reads, but I'm still incredibly glad I read it.