There are short story writers who are masters of characterization and others adept at creating vivid, memorable settings. In his first collection, Alan Heathcock blends both talents to create a stark, memorable portraits of small-town life.
Most of Volt's stories are set in the fictional town of Krafton, "no place for a young person with half a brain," as one character describes it. The town is never explicitly located, but Heathcock has an affinity for describing a natural world that evokes the bleak but beautiful landscapes of the western United States (he teaches creative writing in Idaho). Sudden, violent death haunts the town's inhabitants, and disasters like floods and fires are never distant.
Several of the tales feature Helen Farraley, the grocery store manager improbably turned town sheriff. "Peacekeeper" employs a time-shifting chronology to tell the story of her decision, whether from inexperience, fear or misguided compassion, to conceal the circumstances of a teenage girl's murder and mete out her own brand of rough justice to the killer. In "The Daughter," she's investigating the disappearance of a boy last seen in a corn maze. And in the title story, her arrest of a man who fails to appear for a court date leads her into a tangled world of family violence, with the burden of the town's wrongdoing finally causing her to imagine "God in Heaven just as weary, slouched on his golden throne and deciding to try a smaller flood or two just to see if we'd save ourselves and spare him the effort."
Though religious concerns aren't an overt theme of the collection, Helen's musing reflects the biblical notions of sin, grace and redemption that insinuate their way into these stories. The opener, "The Staying Freight," tells of a father who kills his young son in a farming accident and then leaves town on foot, eventually performing a twisted sort of penance by allowing himself to serve as a punching bag for drunken bar patrons in a distant town. "Lazarus," a quiet, moving story, focuses on Pastor Vernon Hamby (like Helen, a recurring character), the town's Baptist minister. He longs to reconcile with the wife of 30 years who has left him but must accept his inability to overcome a tragic loss that's helped sunder their relationship: "But even if not spoken, everything had finally been said," is the sad benediction he pronounces over their failed marriage.
With these and other stories, readers who admire the kind of vivid, distinctive short fiction displayed in Richard Ford's Rock Springs or David Means's Assorted Fire Events will be excited to discover a familiar but wholly original new voice in Alan Heathcock.--Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: In a collection of well-crafted stories, Alan Heathcock portrays some of the harsh realities of small-town life.