[A] potent brew. After you’ve spent any time with her tough, acrid, blackly funny writing, everything else seems watered down ... A meaty collection ... Proulx’s stories read like full novels that have been radically compressed into 20 or 30 pages.
Reading it is like opening the hall closet and having the contents of an antique junk shop, laced with spiky and rusted farm implements, spill out and maim your dog. I mean this as praise ... Anyone who’s kept pace with Proulx over the decades knows her short stories are her thorniest and most essential work ... I’m aware I’ve made the bulk of Proulx’s stories sound insane. And they are. But the inundation is purposeful and artful. From her chaotic style she coaxes out wild, wind-chapped poetries, as if she were the caller of a cosmic hoedown.
Proulx’s worldview is bleak, to put it mildly, and she doesn’t lavish undue sympathy on her damaged characters, who grapple with hard luck and hard times against landscapes as harsh as the author’s assessment of American history. Her bravura descriptions of those landscapes are one aspect of a superb mastery of craft that makes these stories a must-read for any serious fiction lover ... Dark, dour, and dazzling.
