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Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories

3.85 of 5 stars 3.85 · rating details · 565 ratings · 110 reviews

A ferocious debut that puts Frank Bill’s southern Indiana on the literary map next to Cormac McCarthy’s eastern Tennessee and Daniel Woodrell’s Missouri Ozarks

Crimes in Southern Indiana is the most blistering, vivid, flat-out fearless debut to plow into American literature in recent years. Frank Bill delivers what is both a wake-up call and a gut punch. Welcome to heartlan...more

Paperback, 288 pages

Published August 30th 2011 by FSG Originals

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The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill

Country Noir

5th out of 66 books — 16 voters

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

Community Reviews

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Feb 27, 2012 karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: appalachian-noir-southern-gothic, hey-shorty

sorry, canada. i know i just gave tony burgess the title of "sick fuck," * but i am going to be taking that crown back now, and giving it to frank bill. oh, god - what is that shit clotted all over it?? tony burgess, you sick sick fuck. well done.

this book is...descriptive.

this is another one of those short story collections that is more or less a deconstructed novel. the title of this novel could easily be here is a list of people who died horrible deaths in one place over a number of years su...more

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Feb 17, 2013 Lou rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: march-to-read-2011, noir, mystery-thriller

The author Frank Bill delivers a lethal injection of literal pulp visceral darkness into your bloodstream.
He takes you to hell and back with these characters and stories.
Written in the same vein as Daniel Woodrell and Donald Ray Pollock. The stories are gritty, at times shocking and brutal, vignettes of things that should remain as fiction. Written with short sharp no words wasted, visceral lines of prose. The stories are at times connected with each other as some characters are featured in ot...more

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Dec 17, 2011 Trudi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: a-sense-of-place, short-stories, modern-lit, judge-a-book-by-its-cover, 2011-reads, prose-that-sings, love-the-title, uber-graphic-extreme, crime-mystery, heart-of-darkness, books-i-want-to-marry, noir-is-the-new-black, good-country-people

This book ::flails helplessly:: How do I begin to review these raw and ruthless stories and do them justice? I probably can't ladies and gents, but I want to try goddammit. Frank Bill's collection of crazies and crimes in southern Indiana deserves that much at least.

This is prose that sings -- not with the sweetness and harmony of a Mama Cass, but rather a whiskey-soaked growl and feverish screech of a Janis Joplin. It's jagged, fragmented, and toothsome; at any point ready and able to tear a c...more This book ::flails helplessly:: How do I begin to review these raw and ruthless stories and do them justice? I probably can't ladies and gents, but I want to try goddammit. Frank Bill's collection of crazies and crimes in southern Indiana deserves that much at least.

This is prose that sings -- not with the sweetness and harmony of a Mama Cass, but rather a whiskey-soaked growl and feverish screech of a Janis Joplin. It's jagged, fragmented, and toothsome; at any point ready and able to tear a chunk out of the reader and leave him or her panting and bleeding like the sordid cast of cutthroat characters that populate the pages of these 17 inter-connected stories.

The stories piece together a harsh portrait of poor, scrabbling, backwoods people -- where victims become victimizers, and the brutalized do their fair share of brutalizing in return. As Frank Bill weaves together his tales of madness and mayhem, he is not interested in telling mere exploitative snapshots of gratuitous violence; his carefully crafted stories resonate with gritty themes of PTSD, poverty, domestic violence, addiction, greed and corruption. Each story flashes bright and fierce, a powerhouse on its own, but when melded with its brethren, the sum definitely becomes more awesome than the parts.

Frank Bill is writing Southern Noir and making it his bitch. This is Quentin Tarantino meets Cormac McCarthy. For certain Frank Bill convinces his readers that his Indiana landscape is also no country for old men. How is this for a descriptive simile: Jagged marrow lined his gums like he'd tried to huff a stick of dynamite. But when he stuttered into Medford's ear he sounded like a drunk who had Frenched a running chainsaw.

This isn't a collection to love per se; it certainly won't leave you with the warm and fuzzies. It will shake you up and smack you around a bit though, and you definitely won't forget it easily. It also made me green with envy over how easy Frank Bill makes it all seem. What he accomplishes isn't easy; if it were we'd see the likes of this kind of writing more often.

Iris kept driving. Turned onto the county road, glanced over the field and acres of cedar, saw the smoke rising above the land. He reached over and rubbed Spade between his black ears, not knowing where he was headed, but knowing he wouldn't stop until he was several states shy of the crimes in southern Indiana.

(less)

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Mar 09, 2012 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories-are-your-friends

If you ever wake up and find yourself in one of Frank Bill's stories, you better start praying. You got about five minutes left before something bad happens to you. There will be bone fragments. There will be catherine wheels of pain. Howling. Retching. One thing there won't be is mercy. This is not life as it is lived, this is death as it is died. In Indiana. There's enough stuff for 15 novels crammed into this handful of stories and when you read one you feel like you pulled your foot out of a...more

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Feb 28, 2013 Owen rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Everyone (but specifically people that can handle slightly graphic and gratuitous violence)

Recommended to Owen by: karen

Shelves: short-stories, favorites

This is without a doubt the best book of short stories I have ever read. It has plenty of rednecks and meth. And violence. Think Breaking Bad, (I don't really know any redneck type shows. Maybe parts of The Walking Dead?), meets Nikita. Seriously, here is a tidbit from the story "Old Testament Wisdom":

But when the girl swung the tin door open none of that would matter. Because she was carrying on the wisdom. And watching from the four-by-four, Billy Hines could forgive himself and her grandfathe...more This is without a doubt the best book of short stories I have ever read. It has plenty of rednecks and meth. And violence. Think Breaking Bad, (I don't really know any redneck type shows. Maybe parts of The Walking Dead?), meets Nikita. Seriously, here is a tidbit from the story "Old Testament Wisdom":

But when the girl swung the tin door open none of that would matter. Because she was carrying on the wisdom. And watching from the four-by-four, Billy Hines could forgive himself and her grandfather could rest in peace after his granddaughter pulled the trigger, just as he had that night ten years ago, until the clip was empty.

I loved every single one of these stories so much. I would love to read novels written about each one, because they ended too quickly. Some of them intertwine, like most short story collections do, but every character is unique. I mean, you have redneck drug addicts so you wouldn't think Frank Bill could put a twist on each one but he does. And guess what! He is writing a book that includes some of the characters from at least one of these stories! I am so excited to read it.

As a warning, I will say that these stories are violent. There are lots of sentences like "His knees exploded like eggs when the bullets hit them. and someone's eyes get cut in half horizontally,etc. But they weren't as violent as I thought they would be. Maybe I am just too desensitized to violence (Thanks, the media). Not that I see knife fights or gang rapes on my way to school or anything. My school is kind of close to some bad parts of Worcester, MA (a very ghetto city) but I'm pretty sheltered in my life actually.

I wonder if this is realistic of southern Indiana life. I'm assuming that things like this don't happen every single day, but Frank Bill makes mention of something I've heard before: conflicts between families that don't involve other people. After the rape of a relative, a man goes and beats up the guy that did it. The "witnesses" in the bar deny seeing anything, and they say that it is between the two families. So there are little things like that which are probably common occurrences. (view spoiler)

My favorite story is probably "Old Testament Wisdom" because it has a kick-ass heroine that seeks revenge on the bad guys. But all of the stories have excellent plots and demonstrate the author's incredible talent for writing.(less)

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Mar 05, 2012 Alan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Alan by: Jacob

Shelves: short-stories, read-in-2012

These stories are like the first sentence:Pitchfork and Darnel burst through the scuffed motel door like two barrels of buckshot. The prose is right in your face and doesn't let up. Speeding into the gravel curve, Wayne lost control of the Ford Courier, stomped the gas instead of the brake. (Another opening sentence).

Karen's just reviewed this and I commented I was surprised there was anyone left in Southern Indiana such is the killing that's going on. Some of it is accidental, but mostly it's p...more

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Mar 22, 2013 Jacob rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: i-own, short-fiction, 2011, 2013

March 2013

Josephine's feet found her unlaced boots, disregarded the folding wheelchair leaned against the wall. She wheeled her oxygen tank into the next room, where Able's body fell into the living room wall. She lined the pistol up with his chest, her grip unsteady as her vision. She pulled the trigger.
("These Old Bones," p. 16)

After his two sons disappear (in a drug deal gone wrong), Able Kirby sells his granddaughter to the Hill Clan to pay for his wife's cancer medications, but Josephine a...more March 2013

Josephine's feet found her unlaced boots, disregarded the folding wheelchair leaned against the wall. She wheeled her oxygen tank into the next room, where Able's body fell into the living room wall. She lined the pistol up with his chest, her grip unsteady as her vision. She pulled the trigger.
("These Old Bones," p. 16)

After his two sons disappear (in a drug deal gone wrong), Able Kirby sells his granddaughter to the Hill Clan to pay for his wife's cancer medications, but Josephine and Knee High have other plans ("Hill Clan Cross"/"These Old Bones"/"All the Awful"). The legend of "The Old Mechanic" outlives his power. Carol and Bellmont McGill in "Cold, Hard Love" have big plans for a tournament called the Donnybrook--they just have to kill Carol's father first. An insurance scam goes sour after Connie and her son Pine Box trespass on the wrong property in "Rough Company," "Old Testament Wisdom" takes an eye for an eye several steps too far, disembodied arms haunt Stanley after "The Accident," and much, much more. The broken veterans of this country's wars (foreign, economic, and domestic), and a flood of drugs and crime, bring all kinds of trouble to Southern Indiana, and not many make it out unscathed. I bought Crimes in Southern Indiana in a bookstore in Kentucky on the way home from a cousin's wedding, and I'm glad I didn't read it before I crossed the Kentucky-Indiana border--if I had, I probably would have taken a very long detour to get back to Wisconsin. Lordy, the imagination of this man. One hope it's only his imagination.

That's all I intended to say (but was too lazy to write) when I first read Frank Bill's fiction debut a year and a half ago and gave it a resounding five stars. A year and a half later, I have to re-adjust it to three. Maybe Bill is a weaker writer than I remember (goddamnit, man, it's SHOW don't tell, not the other way around), maybe I was just too starry-eyed and impressionable at the time, maybe the blood and grit and bleak hopeless violence just feels too excessive (especially after reading his equally-over-the-top first novel), maybe all of these, maybe just me. It's still a decent first collection from a writer worth following, but just be careful he doesn't turn around the knife you in the gut when you get too close.

See also: Donnybrook (less)

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Feb 22, 2012 Kemper rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Kemper by: Trudi

Shelves: 2012, crime-mystery, rednecks, short-stories, noir

Is there anybody left alive in Indiana by the end of this book?

Frank Bill delivers a brutal series of short stories about murder, rape, blood feuds, pot dealing, meth dealing, dog fighting, revenge, incest and the occasional shell shocked veteran cutting off a couple of ears. You know, just another Tuesday in the American heartland.

What I particularly liked about this is that Bill uses the stories about various people over a couple of generations to give you a complete picture of an area. By the...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Brian Sweany rated it 5 of 5 stars

There are writers who are uniquely identified with the regions in which they live and/or set their stories, their settings emerging as almost sentient, narrative-driving characters. Some that come readily to mind are Daniel Woodrell's Ozarks, Larry Brown's Mississippi, Ivan Doig's Montana, Dorothy Allison's South Carolina, and James Lee Burke's Louisiana.

Say hello to Frank Bill's southern Indiana!

Frank Bill's 17 sparse, unrepentant stories in his debut collection CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA might...more There are writers who are uniquely identified with the regions in which they live and/or set their stories, their settings emerging as almost sentient, narrative-driving characters. Some that come readily to mind are Daniel Woodrell's Ozarks, Larry Brown's Mississippi, Ivan Doig's Montana, Dorothy Allison's South Carolina, and James Lee Burke's Louisiana.

Say hello to Frank Bill's southern Indiana!

Frank Bill's 17 sparse, unrepentant stories in his debut collection CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA might artistically be the best thing to come out of the Hoosier State since John Mellencamp's AMERICAN FOOL album. Think BREAKING BAD and JUSTIFIED, only grittier and less humane.

Full disclosure: Bill had me at the title, my family's roots traceable to the fertile plains of south-central Indiana and the backwoods of rural Kentucky as far back as the early 1800s. Bill's people are my people, well, sort of. Bill's Indiana is most certainly not my Indiana. It's rusted, ugly, hopeless. Its eyes hallowed out by meth, murder, dogfights, prostitution and Palahniuk-esque bare-knuckle brawls. I make a point to hike the Hoosier National Forest in southern Indiana at least once a summer, and because of Bill's stories this summer will be different.

Oh, rest assured I'll still make the trip. I'm not pissing my pants just for dramatic effect like Tom Franklin, who blurbed about CRIMES that he was "planning a summer trip north from Mississippi [but] these stories caused [him] to reroute to avoid Southern Indiana." (Note I'm also parsing Mr. Franklin's blurb for dramatic effect. I love his work, and anyone who hasn't read HELL AT THE BREECH is lesser for the oversight.) But I won't seek as much solace in the sycamores that hover over the trail like silver sentries. I won't just dismiss the errant echo of gunshot as a hunter or a couple kids playing around. I won't catch a whiff of ammonia or sulfur in the air without imagining a methlab just around the next knob. And for that glorious paranoia--for something I haven't felt in Indiana since I was a teenager armed with a fifth of Rebel Yell from my Dad's liquor cabinet and a dimebag of weed--I thank you, Frank Bill.(less)

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May 06, 2012 Rob Kitchin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Crimes in Southern Indiana is a collection of 17 short stories all set in the area and interlinked by characters and common settings such as the Leavenworth Tavern. They are also the darkest set of country noir tales you're ever likely to read. If they were accompanied by a musical score it would be fighting banjos played by Black Sabbath. These are dark, dark stories of the rural underclass and feature murder, revenge, drugs, prostitution, rape, dog fights, bare knuckle boxing, domestic violenc...more

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Apr 08, 2012 Nigel Bird rated it 5 of 5 stars

To quote Donald Ray Pollock on this: `Good Lord, where the hell did this guy come from?'

Frank Bill describes his work more succinctly and directly than I'm about to when he says at his blog, `House Of Grit', `I don't waste words, I write them.'

In `Crimes In Southern Indiana' we have a book to cherish.

Essentially a collection of short stories, the work grabs hold harder with each page read.

Stories overlap as characters and histories reappear in new situations, the circles becoming tighter and tig...more To quote Donald Ray Pollock on this: `Good Lord, where the hell did this guy come from?'

Frank Bill describes his work more succinctly and directly than I'm about to when he says at his blog, `House Of Grit', `I don't waste words, I write them.'

In `Crimes In Southern Indiana' we have a book to cherish.

Essentially a collection of short stories, the work grabs hold harder with each page read.

Stories overlap as characters and histories reappear in new situations, the circles becoming tighter and tighter until the lines of definition begin to blur and it begins to feel like a novel and like a work of major force.
They tell of a culture that seems completely engrained in the communities and families we get to visit. It's a culture of depth and of major contradiction, one that an outsider might feel the need to eradicate without wanting to throw out the babies with the bathwater. There's good and bad in there and they're so tangled together that there's little hope of separation.

Family loyalty and blood ties are deep-rooted. Revenge is on an eye -for-an-eye basis; better still, two eyes are taken for the one. History and economics has left the people impoverished and forgotten. War veterans pick up the pieces. Police do what they can and sometimes what they shouldn't. Children are ruled with iron-fists and belt-buckles. Need drives all, even the selling of a young girl or the delivery of a knife into a throat. Guns are as part of daily life as pieces of furniture. Hunting takes on new boundaries. Friendships are tight until they aren't. People react to survive in any way they can.

In all the snapshots shown, the centre of the event is often an act of brutality. Within a short space of time, Bill is able to explain lives and reasons and facts without ever being heavy-handed. What is clear is that black and white aren't really colours - they're illusions. There were times during the collection that I was applauding acts of immense brutality and I'll applaud the next time I read them, too.

What I love about a really good short story is the way that it can engage with feeling and with power to leave me completely bowled over. The effect of stringing a series of interwoven tales of the highest calibre is absolutely stunning on all levels (stunned by craft, plot, character, situation, imagination, heart and courage).
Frank Bill is a man who can take hold of the emotional core of a situation as if it were some winged insect, and at the end decide whether to squash it or let it go. He never shirks from difficult finales and tells things exactly as they have to be.

Miss this one and you're making a huge mistake.

Simply magnificent. (less)

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Oct 14, 2011 Brando rated it 3 of 5 stars

I somehow stumbled across this book while in B&N looking for a Warren Buffett book. I probably won the award for oddest combination of purchases that day. After picking up Warren, I walked past the new releases and:

(1) the cover art for this book initially caught my eye.
(2) the title piqued my interest.
(3) the author's name bestowed a sense of confidence that he must be a credible source on such subjects....(and made me chuckle).
(4) the author's bio stated that he actually lives in Southern...more

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Sep 20, 2011 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars

I’d just finished reading Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs when I started reading a lot of Twitter posts talking about a kick ass collection of stories. My lack of impulse control did me a favour and convinced me to buy it now. Bugger! The book is not released in the UK for about four years (months but I have little patience) and the UK cover doesn’t appeal to me as much. Over to Amazon.com I go. After adding international four week shipping it works out less cash than buying the UK version a...more I’d just finished reading Southern Gods by John Hornor Jacobs when I started reading a lot of Twitter posts talking about a kick ass collection of stories. My lack of impulse control did me a favour and convinced me to buy it now. Bugger! The book is not released in the UK for about four years (months but I have little patience) and the UK cover doesn’t appeal to me as much. Over to Amazon.com I go. After adding international four week shipping it works out less cash than buying the UK version anyway. That is a result. It gets better though. Those lovely Amazon pixies managed to row my book across the pond in under two weeks.

Opening my parcel the first thing I notice is how gritty the cover is. I don’t just mean the evocative image of the burned out car, I mean the cover feels like sandpaper. Is this deliberate? Is this an omen? I opened this puppy with the excitement of a five year old at Christmas.

BANG! It is not often that I swear out loud whilst reading the first page of a book. There is no easing you in, setting the scene, putting on those comfy slippers. From the first moment this book hits you right between the eyes like a nine iron. By the end of the first story I was stunned. This is a seriously hardcore work of art. Some of the topics and themes covered go beyond nasty and into the realms uncomfortably terrible.

I read a one star review of this book on Amazon that would have made me want to buy it if I didn’t have it already. It talked about only enjoying this if you wanted to read lots of descriptions of bruises and cuts. Personally I prefer that to repetition. I would personally recommend reading this book in several sittings rather than in one or two long sessions.

I’ve recently started trying to write short stories myself recently and I can quite safely say that if I ever manage to pack anywhere near the amount of emotion that I found in these stories into anything I write, then I would be a very happy man. Every story stands proudly alone, yet there are links between them and the final story closes things off nicely.

Oh and I learned that a wifebeater is a kind of sleeveless t-shirt. Yes I had to Google that.(less)

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Sep 04, 2011 Thomas Pluck rated it 5 of 5 stars

Blood feud poetry. Desperate situations where beat-down people stand on the line between what they know is wrong and sheer survival in a hardscrabble emotionally jagged landscape. Those uncomfortable photos in the middle of the newspaper showing a man with sunken sleep-bruised eyes and a couple column inches detailing the unfathomable things he's done. Staring into the abysmal latrine of humanity, it is easy to sink to nihilism, to embrace the banality of evil, but in Crimes in Southern Indiana,...more

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Dec 07, 2012 Travis Richardson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Frank Bill's Crimes in Southern Indiana is a fascinating and brutal collection of stories featuring rural Indiana's less-than-exemplary citizens. Meth dealers, addicts, dog fighters, MS-13 gangbangers, and compromised law enforcement officials are just a few of the characters that populate these stories of greed and vice. Although the stories often plunge into darkest regions of the soul, Mr. Bill preserves the faintest glimmers of humanity to raise the stories above splatterpunk and into litera...more

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Sep 23, 2011 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

These stories scared the hell out of me and I'm still a little surprised I read them. The people are shockingly violent and corrupt and there's not a hint of redemption for any one. But Frank Bill is an exciting writer and before I knew it, I'd finished a story and was curious about what happens in the next one. This review does a better job than I can -
'Crimes in Southern Indiana': Chewing on ugly Excerpt: "Bill's stories are over the top, but in a good way, in the way that Quentin Tarantino's...more

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Mar 26, 2013 Mel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: from-the-library, some-of-my-best-reads, read-in-2013

Crimes in Southern Indiana is a book filled with short stories by Frank Bill. The characters in his stories are a hard-scrabble people who drink tins of Fall City for breakfast washed down with an eye popping amount of crystal meth. They solve their own problems usually with fists, guns, coon dogs, knives, or running you down with their truck or a combination of the above mentioned. Don’t mess around with the Southern Indiana of Frank Bill’s making they will put you in a bad bad way; maybe even...more

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Jun 14, 2012 Eric rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is some seriously fucking raw shit. I mean that in a good way, and also in a not-so-good way. Bill has talent, no doubt, but comparisons to Donald Ray Pollock and Jim Thompson are a bit premature. Even rough-edged chops need to be polished enough to feel properly rough-edged, and Bill still needs to work on a few basics, like finding the exact right word or turn of phrase; and some basic story mechanics, like ending a story where it needs to end, rather than wherever the writer runs out of...more

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Dec 26, 2011 Mary rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: drug-addicts-fiction, fiction-appalachia

Wow, more hillbilly noir. This guy makes Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy look like Glen Beck's Christmas Sweater. And he has the best cover--ever. My coworker handed me this book, laughing, saying that he knew it was for me, just by looking at the cover.
Who knew that there are El Salvadorian gangs running the meth trade out there? Or that coon hounds were used in dog fighting (my grandpa was a well-known coon hound breeder and trainer; I'm not entirely sure I believed this part of the stories). But who...more

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Apr 29, 2013 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: bad-boys, damn-good, hugs-not-drugs, short-stories, gritty-and-raw, blood-in-the-heartland

There is blood bubbling up to the surface of the ground from all the bodies slaughtered and left for dead in a similar fashion to the Einsatzgruppen in Nazi Germany. Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories is a very violent book to say the least, but I loved every minute. Frank Bill created a world where no one comes out alive and everyone suffers cruelty beyond measure. I am from the Heartland, but not Frank Bill’s Heartland. My mind was swimming by the time I finished the book so I wrote down all...more

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Dec 30, 2011 J.D. rated it 5 of 5 stars

You might try to comfort yourself by thinking that Frank Bill's exaggerating for dramatic effect in these short, tightly written tales of country meth addicts, domestic brutality, unpredictably vicious rednecks, and rural ultra-violence. You might try to tell yourself that things this grim and lurid could never happen in real life. But I can tell you, they do.

This is not a book for the faint of heart; it's pure distilled redneck noir, and there are few happy endings. But the quality of the wri...more

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Jan 13, 2012 Gareth Price rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a fantastic debut collection from Frank Bill. He grabs you by the scruff of the neck & drags you through his characters own personal hells and then back again. He deals in the compromised and disenfranchised - people scrabbling under the radar, desperately scraping by. Hard hitting, and sometimes unrelenting, the whole work is shot through with dark humour - Mr Bill knows these characters, lives and breathes with them. His writing style takes a bit of getting used to, but once it cli...more

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Aug 26, 2012 ron swegman rated it 5 of 5 stars

.

Frank Bill has provided a poetic punch in contemporary American fiction's face. His debut collection of short stories begins with a room bursting from a fight and ends with a barn burning down. No grief-laden divorce or cancer ruminations are to be found on these pages. The characters are marginal residents of the rural midwestern gutter. Relationships here are shotgun and death comes in the form of bad choices or from the consequences derived therefrom. Bill's prose is crisp and full of painfu...more

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Mar 11, 2013 Michelle Hanlin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: drama

I suppose I have to give this a 4 out of 5 because some chapters I squirrled around as a I read, at times sick to my stomach. And this is coming from someone who's a Hoosier in love with scary movies and the like. He also included PTSD from war in almost every story with a motive of revenge or jealousy. This was the common thread through all of them (aside from them being set in Indiana). I do think that the stories jumped around too much, which made it difficult to follow the characters. Bill a...more

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Sep 16, 2011 Gordon rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's amazing the characters of this region managed to live long enough to appear in their stories, given the rate at which they're bludgeoned and exterminated so indiscriminately. The first couple tales will tell you right away whether this is for you or not. Full of vengeance, cheatin', meth, dogfighting, etc. — hard-livin' folk playing their dealt hands the only way they know how, past always nipping at their doors. It's very consistent, and though the tales get and certain descriptions get a...more

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Feb 21, 2013 Rupert rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book was a big disappointment. Not only did it come highly recommended by my brother who I usually agree with on books and movies, but it had a rave blurb from Donald Ray Pollock, whose Knockemstiff is my favorite book I've read in the last few months. Unlike Knockemstiff or other rural gothic books like Winter's Bone or early Cormac McCarthy, this book doesn't bother much with creating characters with any depth before brutalizing them.
This isn't a study of real people malformed by a hars...more

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May 09, 2012 Darryl rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Mr. Bill, I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Thomas Hobbes."
"Mr. Hobbes, this is Frank Bill who is a big fan of your work, especially your ruminations about man's 'natural state.' in the absence of a viable social contract. He seems especially fond of your description of man's condition as being one of 'continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'
'It appears the state of which you spoke a few hundred years ago was more literal than...more "Mr. Bill, I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Thomas Hobbes."
"Mr. Hobbes, this is Frank Bill who is a big fan of your work, especially your ruminations about man's 'natural state.' in the absence of a viable social contract. He seems especially fond of your description of man's condition as being one of 'continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.'
'It appears the state of which you spoke a few hundred years ago was more literal than you know and actually had a name... Indiana. Certainly in Mr. Bill's accounts the social contract in that part of the New World appears tenuous, at best, as he writes of the various murders, assaults, defilements, thievery, and villainy visited upon each other by the inhabitants of that state's southern regions. True, he writes with gusto and has a sharp (stick in the) eye for the basest analogy or metaphor, and one cannot help oneself from reading page after revolting page to see what horror comes next. Even those sworn to uphold the shaky social contract by enforcing its laws are found to be little better than those they would control. But the source of all of this mischief, Mr. Bill seems to suggest, is not some external Malevolence, but the bloody and unpleasant consequences of the frequently war-like experiences in which the larger society has demanded individuals participate as one of the costs of their citizenship. The evidence of their psychological state and the rationale for their actions is painfully obvious and believable though in no way laudable in any one of his individuals. There is no redemptive tale in the whole lot. In short, it is both the individual AND the social group's norms that are at fault."
"Under these circumstances and with Mr. Bill's keen observations one may be tempted to endorse one of your less liberal ideas that a strong absolutist governor is the answer. Alas, that doesn't seem to work well either. But one is in no wise tempted to rent a summer home in the hills of southern Indiana."
"What say you, Mr. Bill? Mr. Hobbes?"
(less)

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Oct 31, 2011 James rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is astonishingly good.

This ranks among the top of all fiction books I've read.

That said, I hesitate to think of people I would recommend it to. A few come to mind, but: this book is brutal. These aren't, well, white collar crimes - these are rough and awful crimes.

I deliberately won't say the crimes are graphic, because even though the acts are - the language isn't. Plot, pacing, etc aside, the language and the phrasing and the metaphors in this book knock my socks off. This is an outs...more

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Mar 08, 2013 Clarissa marked it as to-read

Shelves: abandoned, books-i-wish-i-hadn-t-bought

Disclaimer: I only got 1/3 of the way through this book.

Being from Louisville, KY, ragging on Southern Indiana is basically a birthright. I generally take unencumbered delight in making fun of people from Southern Indiana over petty things like their poor driving, and saying things like "If you think Kentuckians are trashy...just go across the bridge!" . Is Southern Indiana kind of a desperate place? Yes. Are there tons of meth labs? Yes. Is there a general fog of racism and sexism that hangs ov...more

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Nov 30, 2012 S.D. rated it 3 of 5 stars

I think I made the mistake of trying to devour this book -- I read too much of it and got a little burned out by all the dark, horrific, irredeemable people. It's best to read in small chunks. And compared to the writing in "Winter's Bone" and "The Devil All the Time" (which I started), I don't think the stories are as tight, the language as seamless.

With that said, I think there's some great stuff here. I'm a HUGE fan of Spoon River Anthology and this reminds me of that -- intertwined stories f...more

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