In the Devil’s Territory by Kyle Minor
My rating: 4/5 cats
i have gotten out of the habit of reviewing, so forgive me if i do it all wrong.
this book was not what i was expecting at all, and this time, that is a good thing.
my recent foray into the short story has introduced me to collections like Crimes in Southern Indiana and Knockemstiff, and judging by the blurbs, i thought that this was going to be like those stories; brutal little pieces about people scraping by, turning to crime and living hardscrabble lives of desperation. but those stories, while i love them and they are wonderfully evocative pieces that bring those characters and locations to life and grab my readerly soul by the balls and shake me ruthlessly, seem lacking compared with minor’s stories. these stories are longer, deeper, more impactful. they are like the wellspring from which those other storytellers draw their inspiration. these stories feel like they should have that “master of the short story” stamp upon them.
there are only six stories in this 223-page collection, so several of them are practically novellas, some of which span over fifty years of events, and the characters will pop up in other stories to different degrees. that feat alone is worth the price of admission.
their thematic link seems to be the unknown past—the way our judgment of people is flawed because of all we cannot know. these stories reveal these hidden moments, and allow the reader a godlike understanding of the root causes of a character’s behavior, and how these hidden moments come into play as one character confronts another or makes generalizations based on their incomplete understanding of other’s and their own hidden moments. there is probably a more elegant way to describe this phenomenon, but i am out of practice.
these are stories to return to. they are stories to appreciate on several levels—psychologically and also just their sheer craftsmanship.
yeah, alan, only four stars cats. i wasn’t feeling the full five here, but i await your review so i can be shamed by whatever it is i am not able to articulate right now.
this book deserves a better reviewer than i can be right now. but if you read the book, you might be able to understand what it is i am fumbling towards expressing.
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