The Spot

This short collection of short short stories all take place in a particular 'spot'. The singular sense of place in each story gives the eccentrics, hoboes, lowlifes and meanos a specific place to carve their loneliness and reflection. Each story is writing in a muscular stream of consciousness, with no word spared, yet each sentence containing hard-edged prose, drawing on solitude, wit and self-delusion to create a memorable set of characters.

Opener 'The Knocking' is a bit of misdirection as it concerns a man being driven slowly mad by his neighbour's trampling of floorboards. Madcap and hilarious, it delves into the psyche of a seemingly normal Manhattenite driven slowly insane. Other 'spots' include railroad junctions and campsites, Upper Manhattan apartments where lovers meet and madmen reside and hideouts in dusty Plains towns. Lowlifes are dispensed with in 'The Botch', 'The Blade' and 'Oklahoma'. Two adulterous lovers realising their affair must end are given a coarse and witty deconstruction.

Means' sense of location really adds to the people he explores. The writing is dense and yet compact. He is a master of the short story form, and four collections in, shows the same twinkly-eye-sparkle as writers like Lorrie Moore. A real timely and spacially impressive collection of stories, beautifully packaged and filled with a dense prose prone to endless rereading.