Best 2008 Debut from a 53-Year-Old Author

December's closing in, and in that pre-Thanksgiving welling of Auld Lang Syne spirit, I wanted to take another look at what was probably my favorite book of the year, Knockemstiff. In the cloud of Amazon's top 100 picks of 2008, Donald Ray Pollock's debut collection dropped in at #21, which is probably reasonable placement for a book that compelled me to write:

Donald Ray Pollock ... populates his own Knockemstiff with living revenants: huffers, murderers, sex fiends, and their hapless (though not innocent) victims, all tethered to the woebegone "holler" by their own self-inflicted shortcomings and depravities. Pollock pulls no punches--his prose is blunt and visceral, as well as stylish and skilled--and reading these mini grand guignols can be like crunching on a mouthful of your own broken teeth.

Goodness gracious. But I stand by that--I actually really like it--even if it did draw some puckered expressions from my coworkers. In any case, Pollock's is a brilliant debut; it just might not be for everybody. The real gobsmacker was learning that Pollock hails from a real place called Knockemstiff, Ohio, and while his characterizations are clearly embellished, it's a fascinating crossroads. Information about the real burg is hard to come by, but here's a picture from the spare and weird-yet-somewhat-compelling Ghost Towns of Ohio web site:

 

And for a better sense of its origins:

How did Knockemstiff get its awesome name? There are a few stories. The most common is that there was a big brawl in the town tavern. Another tells of a woman who asked a preacher how she could get her cheating husband to stay home. "Knockemstiff," the preacher replied.

A few of us at Amazon had the opportunity to talk with Pollock over lunch, and thankfully, he was not nearly as depraved as his cast of reprobates. Before he quit his life in the factories in the towns near Knockemstiff, he hadn't held any obsessive pretensions about writing a novel or spent a lifetime spinning marginal prose--he just decided that it was something he might be able to do, and at the age of 45, he decided he had better act fast. Can't wait for the next one.

For more in this vein, you may want to go back to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, another collection of private shame and despair, and Knockemstiff's obvious literary ancestor. What's going on in Ohio?

--Jon