Review by New York Times Review
AFTER eight novels centered mainly on the poor and criminal in his native Missouri Ozarks, including the much lauded "Winter's Bone," Daniel Woodrell has published his first story collection, "The Outlaw Album," and for readers of both crime and literary fiction, there is much to celebrate. Woodrell writes about violence and dark deeds better than almost anyone in America today, in compact, musical prose that doesn't dwell on visceral detail. An unerring craftsman, he can fully describe a murder in one rich sentence: "The first time he killed the man, Jepperson, an opinionated foreigner from Minnesota, he kept to simple Ozark tradition and used a squirrel rifle, bullet to the heart, classic and effective, though there were spasms of the limbs and even a lunge of big old Jepperson's body that seemed like he was about to take a step, flee, but he died in stride and collapsed against a fence post." Every story is loaded with gems like that. As the title indicates, trouble is as pervasive in "The Outlaw Album" as rats in a corncrib. A Vietnam vet kills an intruder in his home, only to discover the man is another veteran from a more recent war suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. An adolescent girl dumps her uncle, an odious, brain-damaged rapist, in the river to drown after she realizes he's recovering from the injuries she inflicted. A grieving, paranoid father studies his neighbors, wondering which of them might be responsible for his daughter's disappearance. Gritty stuff, to be sure, but Woodrell always takes the high road, concentrating on the causes of violence and its psychological impact on people's lives. As an elderly man says to a young, idealistic woman who's trying to get his treacherous son released from prison early: "If I love Cecil now it is like the way I love the Korean conflict. Something terrible I have lived through." Several factors give the stories an ageless quality, including Woodrell's precise, hard-edge language and his principal subject matter - death and love and family connections and neighborly disputes - which is as old as humankind itself. The rural setting in the Ozarks reminds us that even today, in our fast-paced, technological world, there are people whose ties to the land are as thick as the blood shed in these stories. In "The Echo of Neighborly Bones," Woodrell describes the place where a man finally decides to hide his murdered neighbor's body: "Boshell's people had lived on this dirt until the government annexed it for the National Forest in the 1950s, and lazy old time had slowly reclaimed the place for trees and weeds and possums. He came here often, to sit and wonder, and feel robbed of all these acres." Half a century has passed, but the killer still pines for his roots. Although the collection isn't fat, with seven of its dozen stories ranging from just 4 to 10 pages, "The Outlaw Album" will still be required reading for Woodrell's many admirers, and it will serve as a worthwhile introduction to those unfamiliar with his work. Quoting again from "The Echo of Neighborly Bones," the opening sentence - "Once Boshell finally killed his neighbor he couldn't seem to quit killing him" - sums up the entire collection. Most of the stories deal with the darkest recesses of the human heart, and once you begin reading them you can't stop. Donald Ray Pollock is the author of "Knockemstiff," a story collection. His first novel, "The Devil All the Time," was published in July.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 8, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
Woodrell's novels have the feel of short fiction crisply detailed episodes that generate a remarkable intensity of felt life so it's hardly a surprise that, in his first collection of stories, he proves adept at tightening the focus of his telescope still further and homing in on cross sections of human pain, need, and frustration. His subjects in these 12 stories are largely drawn from the world of his novels: men and women living desperate, often criminal, lives deep in the Ozarks, lives regularly engulfed by meanness but also radiating a sense of hard-won humanity. In Twin Forks, for example, the humanity surfaces in the form of a shell-shocked Iraq War vet painting a picture of a dead cow; in Florianne, a story almost too painful to endure, we see love in the obsession of a grieving father who looks deeply in the eyes of his neighbors, trying vainly to detect which one of them abducted his daughter. And in The Echo of Neighborly Bones, we somehow find abiding tenderness in the crazed actions of a murderer: Once Boshell finally killed his neighbor he couldn't quit killing him. --Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In his eight novels, Woodrell (Winter's Bone) has been doing for his native Missouri Ozarks what William Faulkner did for rural Mississippi: introduce readers to a region whose rural residents are too often summarily dismissed in our American consciousness with simplistic stereotypes. The characters in collection of short fiction, Woodrell's first, lead hard, desperate lives that can erupt into violence and tragedy. Despite the simmering tensions among family members, between friends and neighbors, and, especially, towards strangers, however, the criminals in these 12 tales always maintain a simple code of honor as they seek their own brand of justice against those who've crossed them. A man brutally avenges the shooting of his wife's beloved dog by his snobby neighbor; a rapist is incapacitated and then cared for by a young woman until she realizes he's completely beyond redemption; an outsider's splendid new house is torched by an angry neighbor. Woodrell's spare, brutal prose, a kind of "country noir," captures the true essence of a rough little pocket of America's heartland that has yet to be-and may indeed never be-smoothed over. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Woodrell is red hot after the film adaptation of his Winter's Bone got an Oscar nomination and the audiobook snagged an Audie. After years of anonymity, Woodrell is very much in the public eye now, so this is another title to have along with print copies of his top-shelf Southern noir. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
