Knockemstiff

Most of the broken inhabitants of Knockemstiff, Ohio, can only get through their disappointed/disappointing lives by ingesting some drug or another, be it booze (‘Albert’s head started trembling as soon as his yellow eyes zoomed in on the wine’); speed (‘wrapped in a sheet of bloody butcher’s paper that had CHUCKIE’S HOG BRAINS writ on it with a blue crayon’); steroids (’fifty ccs of Mexican Deca … thick as molasses, tough shit to inject, but it won’t bloat you up like a fucking Amish ham either’); or even the industrially produced anaesthetic Bactine (‘I’d apparently let him talk me into huffing several cans … and then I was sick, and my brain felt like a frozen bleach bottle’).

As Pollock’s stories unfold, we are introduced to as grotesque a carnival of deadbeats as you could hope to find in modern-day America. Many of these reappear as secondary characters in other stories (Panos Karnezis did a similar thing in Little Infamies, but his setting was a considerably sunnier if equally impoverished Greek village).

Alcoholic Vern beats a man to a pulp in the toilets of the drive-in in front of his mild-mannered son; a small-time criminal’s winning streak comes to an abrupt end when he falls off a roof in the rain; overweight Bernie, coping with his wife’s nagging and a disabled son whose brains have been fried in a drugs binge, cracks at the drive-thru when taunted by a car full of teenagers; Frankie and Bobby’s plan to light out for California on the proceeds of stolen pharmaceutical speed ultimately goes literally nowhere and ends with Frankie trying to cook a three-day-old dead chicken in a burning tyre.

These are bleak tales of a community that has lost its way, or been left to rot – or both. The fact that some of Knockemstiff’s residents dream of moving away, or have plans to improve themselves, is made more tragic when their aspirations crumble around their ears.

Surprisingly, though, this is one of the funniest books I’ve read for years. Pollock is a master of the knockout line and he’s generous in sharing them with us: ‘Within forty-five minutes my heart was ticking like a live bomb. By midnight I was chewing holes in my tongue listening to Frankie obsess about having sex with movie stars.’ Or this: ‘She was trying to pick pork and beans out of Jerry’s hair while he made another attempt to walk through the wall.’

He’s also got a knack for painting us gruesome miniatures and then moving on, leaving us to deal with what he’s just oh-so-casually plugged into our head: ‘By the time he ran me down in that cornfield, he was so pissed that he had his boys hold me while he chipped my front teeth out one by one with a spike nail he pulled out of a rotten fence.’

Beware, then: this collection (unbelievably, a debut) contains images that you’d really rather have viewed through frosted glass. There’s also bad sex and plenty of swearing, but not to give Knockenstiff a go would be a big mistake. Pollock’s stories may make you wince, but he’s exposing a deep melancholy among the citizens left behind by the American dream.

As Big Bernie so succintly puts it, ‘I’m beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.’