Books in Canada
Scott Wolven’s stories are pared down. There’s a hint of Raymond Carver in his style, although his characters sometimes seem to owe more to pulp auteur Jim Thompson’s hard-bitten guys. It would be wrong to describe the stories as “minimalist” since there are occasional bursts of poetic description. Still, a typical story of his, like the opening one, not accidentally titled “Taciturnity”, sticks mostly to the facts and leaves interpretation to the reader. Wolven’s characters are men on society’s edge, who live by their wits, fists, and sometimes guns. When they’re out of prison, they prefer jobs like woodcutting, bounty hunting, or small-engine repair that are cash-based and don’t require Social Security numbers. More than a few of them live under assumed names. For them, being a man means doing what men do without asking too many questions.
Interestingly, the stories are divided into two groups, according to their regional settings. The Northeast Kingdom Stories are set in New England, especially around Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The second set of stories, the Fugitive West, take place in the Rockies, or free-fire, militia-friendly zones like Idaho. In both sets, the stories usually undergo a sudden ramping up of violence, which stems from either the characters or the weather. Such moments are grounded in the personalities of the characters and descriptions of settings, but they nevertheless seem to come out nowhere, and the effect on the reader is intense. In one story, the victim of an unforeseen occurrence is oddly named Red Green. He’s a drug dealer, a druggie, and a rapid-fire conversationalist with little other similarity to the genial icon of Possum Lodge, except for this urge to “head to Canada,” which gets him killed. He turns up in two stories, a tactic that brings to mind Davidson’s collection.
In “Tigers”, the surprise reminds one of Hitchcock’s Psycho, because the protagonist dies partway through the story, and the focus suddenly shifts to a new character. This story differs from the others in one other way: it is the only one to launch into a narrator’s reveries, blurring the line between action, imagination and memory.
Wolven has a gift for making a lot happen in a few sentences. The last few of “Vigilance” are a good example:
“So I went in undercover, and in the middle, the fucking middle of it all, there was an hour where nobody was watching me and I had a little money and I slipped away, on the ghost train out of there. I can’t even imagine how many people are looking for me now.”
Wolven can write well about boxing, although he doesn’t have a hand for fine prose. In “El Rey”, a vicious boxing match is superbly framed by a narrative that yields a portrait of a man for whom violence is a means of getting by, no different than any of the other skills he relies on. Wolven’s stories are memorable It’s not hard to see why he was featured in The Best American Mystery Stories for three consecutive years.
John Oughton (Books in Canada)
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. To say that these beautifully written, deceptively simple stories are loosely connected is to miss a large part of the point. The collection, divided into two geographical sections ("The Northeast Kingdom" and "The Fugitive West"), begins with a man trapped into becoming a drug informant; it ends with another man getting the same treatment from the authorities. All the stories, including three that have been published in recent
Best American Mystery Stories anthologies, share certain themes: life in prison; a fascination with guns and violence, even among men who aren't career criminals; the despair of working-class life, especially in jobs on the fringes of economically depressed areas. A man on a prison farm buries the bodies of dead convicts while a deer caught on an electric fence burns in the background. A gang of Hispanic fighters descends from Canada to challenge workers at a logging camp in bloody battles. Wolven's prose is as cold and sharp as an ice crystal: "If I'm not here day after tomorrow," a sheriff tells the narrator of "Atomic Supernova," "you go ahead and kill Bob Burke and we'll figure it all out later." Wolven's not as romantic or sympathetic as Hemingway, but it's hard to think that Papa wouldn't appreciate his artistry and imagination.
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