There are more wounds than love in TV screenwriter (The Mentalist) Jordan Harper's first collection of stories. Love and Other Wounds packs a lot of violence, crime and broken dreams into its 15 short depictions of life on the ragged edges. Although some take place in Detroit, New York and Los Angeles, most are set in the bars and strip malls around Harper's hometown of Springfield, Mo.--"Queen City of the Ozarks." If this sort of "country noir" has become its own genre thanks to Daniel Woodrell, Larry Brown and Donald Ray Pollock, Harper brings his own skewed eye and ear to what he calls "that country-grit subculture." His stories are filled with biker and prison gangs, tweakers, drug deal "watchdogs," "cleaners" of Hollywood star indiscretions and teen gas station bandits. They live in "a faraway corner of the world, one of those places marked Here Be There Dragons on old maps," and to the "watchdog" known only as Geat, they are "just a bunch of trembling suckmouthed peckerwoods each scared of their own shadow."
Harper's stories are relentlessly violent, but he seasons the violence with compassion for his characters' fates. What love finds its way into Love and Other Wounds is just for a moment and often betrayed. Wounds, however, last forever. As one drug dealer notes, "Everybody's got their share of pain, even though it always feels like more than their share. Pain is part of the deal." And Harper won't let us forget it. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.