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Feb 03, 2012

Lou rated it:

Stories set mostly in Knockemstiff and some centred round A Paper mill where the author used to work. I have just completed recently reading his very good first novel The Devil All the Time which had some memorable characters and a brutal plot. With the novel being the first work of his I have read my expectations where risen high on the beginning of reading these short stories in his writing prose and they fell short in satisfying my appetite for his work slightly. These short stories do have m More...

2 comments like (8 people liked it)

Jun 04, 2008

Laura rated it:

"As my parents' bed thumped loudly against the floor in the next room, I lapped the blood off my knuckles. The dried flakes dissolved in my mouth, turning my spit to syrup. Even after I'd swallowed all the blood, I kept licking my hands. I tore at the skin with my teeth. I wanted more. I would always want more."

So ends "Real Life," the first story in Donald Ray Pollock's knockout of a debut. It seems that every review I've read uses two phrases to describe this co More...

2 comments like (11 people liked it)

May 07, 2008

Kevin rated it:

Yep. I'll put it on my all-time faves list. Donald Ray seems to be working on a much higher, much riskier level than any other new writer out there. This set of slightly-connected stories (they all take place in Knockemstiff, Ohio) is so constantly great that I couldn't help but shake my head. Some people I've talked with about this book have suggested it's too brutal for them to read in long stretches but I found that Pollack's bleak narratives were often spiced up with enough strange details a More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Feb 06, 2008

Troy rated it:

Don't get me wrong; the writing is good, and the acts of the characters are unapologetic and seem to be basic fucntions of their personalities. But I simply cannot read the inner thoughts of a segment of the population that would sooner call me nigger and blame me for their lot rather than the very fact they're stuck in a dead-end life. I'm not emotionallly involved in the book, and started to actualy root for them to screw each other's life up.

Others have remarked how touching the b More...

3 comments like (4 people liked it)

Aug 13, 2008

Jeff rated it:

Pollock is an immensely talented writer and "Knockemstiff" is a shocking, brutal, fascinating look at people who are both damaged and damaging living in a place that is also both damaged and damaging. At each turn, the interconnected stories in this book brim with uglinesss, seething with a tension that often erupts into violence. However, every story, no matter how seemingly savage, is laced with heartbreak and tenderness.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 13, 2008

G rated it:

Gritty, dirty, nasty tales. Well-woven and all connected stories about a place called Knockemstiff. Not every story holds up, but most feel as satisfying as a punch in the gut and as soul-quenching as lukewarm Pabst Blue Ribbon.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 27, 2011

Jacob rated it:

All the ugly parts of humanity are crowded into a single town--and all of those ugly parts trying to escape. They rarely do. Donald Ray Pollock's first (and hopefully not last) collection of stories is thuggish and brutal; reading it, however, is a delicate act. If you try to speed through Knockemstiff in a few days, like I did the first time I read it back in spring 2008, you may have to fight back the urge to curl up on the bathroom floor and not talk to anyone for about a week. On the oth More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Oct 19, 2008

Goose rated it:

Though I don't read many short story collections, I have enjoyed some by Jayne Anne Phillips, Tobias Wolff, and Perry Glasser in the past. I had no intention of reading this collection but picked it up one day and WHAMMMMM!!!! These stories are a visceral, literary punch to the stomach. The characters are sad mostly lonely losers. Many seem to be searching for a bit of hope and looking for change, but they lack the intiative to create change themselves. Though these people seem a bit bleak they More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 25, 2008

Zerbe rated it:

Like Sherwood Anderson's classic Winesburg, Ohio on speedballs comes Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff. Told from the viewpoints of a variety of hopeless, fuck-ups from the little town of Knockemstiff, Ohio through the years, this novel is a truly (and wonderfully) brutal piece of work.

Each story builds upon those before it in theme, character and story itself. People show up again and again, their problems doubling and tripling, the path of destitution continuing to spiral downwar More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 15, 2008

Gregory rated it:

“Forgetting our lives might be the best we’ll ever do."

The stories found In “Knockemstiff,” Donald Ray Pollock’s raw and powerful literary debut, are not for the faint of heart. Brutal and uncompromising, they capture the hardscrabble lives of the residents of Knockemstiff, Ohio – the very same town that Pollock comes from (although he cautiously points out in his acknowledgments that the actual residents of his hometown are really “good people who never hesitated to help som More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Mar 19, 2008

Kilean rated it:

Probably best not to read these straight through. Maybe take a break between stories and go pick a flower, spin some Yanni. This stuff is smelly and mean. And yes, it does seem like a lot of short story writers have an easy time depicting brutal people doing nasty things to one another and the world at large, and a lot of those same writers have no interest in originality. Not so with this writer. It's like he's got an extra gear – e.g. not only is the hash a couple of dudes are smoking causing More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Mar 24, 2008

Bill rated it:

I grew up in Cincinnati, and whenever I read Raymond Carver, all the characters seemed to speak to me with an Appalachian accent. Wrong of course, but it felt right to me.

Now here comes Pollock's "Knockemstiff," set in the hopeless oxycontin hollers of Southern Ohio, and those Carver-like characters of Appalachia have a fine writer who knows how to give them voice.

Half the stories (the first fourth of the book and the last fourth) are very fine indeed. an More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 22, 2009

Cecilia rated it:

OK, all the reviewers raved over this bleak, depressing hopeless book. I suppose if you have never lived or worked in a socio-economically repressed area, you would think this is a realistic book. The reality is that in almost all communities there are both hopeless and hopeful people and stories. This was just some seriously dramatized and silly, like J.T. Leroy books.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 24, 2008

Zach rated it:

I haven't really read a book like this before. Knockemstiff is about a small town, the author's home, im rural Ohio. A collection of short stories about the tragic characters that inhabit Knockemstiff, there is interplay between the stories that gives the book the overall feeling of a novel. Each story is not only very well written, using a subtle sort of vernacular but, also jarring in a grotesque and not so subtle way. Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love, explains, she had to go for a walk More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 12, 2008

Lori rated it:

I can't begin to say enough good about this book, so I won't try. The only thing wrong with this book is that I had trouble trying to write while I was reading it, because his stories were in my head instead of my own.

These are dark stories. Looking for a pick-me-up? Go somewhere else. Looking for happy endings and life lessons? Somewhere else. But if you're tired of fiction about people whose problems don't seem all that problematic, maybe you're ready for the sad lives of the peopl More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Sep 20, 2011

Jonathan rated it:

I went back and forth on whether to give this book 3 or 4 stars. The 4th star was awarded for a very personal reason. There are parts so wild, so seedy, so perverse that I cringed, laughed, shivered and sweat all at once. That's a fine reaction. Except for one thing. The town of Knockemstiff, Ohio closely resembles the region of the country where I grew up, both in substance and proximity. This book changed the way I look at the...let's just say..."undesirable" parts of my childhood ho More...

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Aug 28, 2011

John rated it:

A great collection of short stories centered on the very real quasi-ghost town of the author's birth. Similar to Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, "Knockemstiff" journeys through the terrible lives of various inhabitants through the decades who're all tied to the not-so-peaceful patch of land in a remote rural corner of people's awareness. Hell, it even includes a small map of the holler complete with the locations of people's houses.

Interestin More...

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Aug 21, 2011

Doug rated it:

A longer review is maybe forthcoming, but to explain my rating in brief...ish...

This is a series of four star, and in a few cases five star stories, only held back by one or two two- and three-star stories, that as a collection gets 3-stars. Because though Pollock doesn't strike me as a one-trick pony, too many of the stories are effectively the same. Some loser at the beginning of a downward spiral (or maybe at the end of one) joins up with some other loser or two who doesn't realize More...

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Jul 24, 2011

Eric rated it:

You know those people in high school that you occasionally think about and wonder if they ever went anywhere but downhill? Maybe the stole painkiller from their grandmothers to get high or huffed paint but you just knew that these people were at best going to end up in prison. Knockemstiff is stories these people: petty criminals, oxy addicts, child molesters, wife beaters, etc... The stories are fast and often brutal. I don't think there's a hero in the bunch. Some of the characters are lit More...

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Jul 19, 2011

Don rated it:

Most people who do any reading will tell you they have read a book (or several) that take place in a locale that they then want to visit. Based on the author's descriptions of the places and the people in them, after the book is done you're drawn to the place. Knockemstiff refers to a real town in Ohio, but based on the author's depiction of the place and its denizens, I'm thinking it is a place to actively avoid.

In all seriousness, Pollock mentions in the acknowledgements section of More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 07, 2011

Bill rated it:

4-stars is perhaps a timid choice. it's been a long time since i've frequented goodreads, so i'm hesitant to toss around superlatives but "knockemstiff" is a unique, surprising collection of short stories equally outlandish in their dismal, daily miseries as valuably insightful into the human frailties that lead to and inhabit the characters that live them. This much anger, loneliness and perversity cannot possibly exist in a single town the size of knockemstiff but they are pervasive More...

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Feb 07, 2011

Nigel rated it:

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock

One Man's Opinion

“When you first heard him talking about it, you’d figure he was batshit crazy, but really he was just trying to latch onto something that would fill up his days so he didn’t have to think about what a fucking mess he’d made of everything. It’s the same for most of us; forgetting our lives might be the best we’ll ever do.”

On my bookshelves, higgledy-piggledy as they are, Raymond Carver’s ‘No Heroics Plea More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2011

Ethel rated it:

Donald Ray Pollock’s short story collection KNOCKEMSTIFF contains eighteen gripping and brilliant linked stories—terrible moments, scenes, and characters throughout that are so keenly observed, so brutally rendered, I often wanted to look away. Only I couldn’t stop reading. Pollock’s writing here is so confident, so skillful, I felt vested from the outset and read on enthralled.

As I read those first four unforgettable stories, I felt the skin on my arms tingle and inwardly declared Pol More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 24, 2010

Jake rated it:

Every story in Knockemstiff is a beautiful example of what it's like to be a shitty person in a shitty town. On its own, each story here is a starkly depressing, inventive tale of White Trash Ohio and its drunks and bums and drunken bums. These stories are so good, they make you want to bag and board the issue of Playboy or Esquire in which they appear.

The problem, though, is that Knockemstiff is a short story collection. You can bust through in two afternoons, and when you read these More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 16, 2010

Brett rated it:

"Knockemstiff" is depressing as hell! But not in the sense that the book isn't any good, it is. The book is about the town of Knockemstiff, Ohio and there just isn't anything happy about the place.

This book has a little bit of everything: drugs, rape, murder, incest, sex, corruption, addiction, love, racism, steroids, domestic abuse, theft, fishsticks and a whole lot of other things I would rather not mention in my review!

It's a very gritty but quick read, onl More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 26, 2009

Matt rated it:

I like Pollock's writing and found some of the marginal characters very empathetic and well drawn. The main issue was that the book distorted the events and the idea of rural poverty into something comic and pathetic populated by comic and pathetic freaks. I am excited by the possibilities of regional literature, especially after reading some recent essays by William Gass and Ben Marcus where they drop a line or two about the worthlessness of religion writing, lumping this work in with chainsaw More...

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Feb 04, 2009

Tripp rated it:

What do you get when you put Winesburg, Ohio , a bevy of Jim Thompson characters, and the songs of Big Black and the Drive By Truckers in a blender? You get the brief, brutal and sad stories of Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff. Pollock was born in the actual town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, a town which may have named after a fistfight. The citizens do their best to live up to their town's heritage by filling their days with casual violence, thoughtlesssex and a wide range of substance abuse.
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0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 08, 2012

Abeille rated it:

I wish there was another rating I could give this book, one other than "liked it". I'm not really sure what to say about this book at all. It's well written, and it kept me engaged in reading further to find out what would happen. But that was mostly because I was so very appalled at the things that were happening. Knockemstiff depicts a world that is wholly unfamiliar to me, one filled with rampant domestic abuse, rampant substance abuse, incest, murder, and pervasive hopelessness. I More...

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Nov 08, 2011

Cedar rated it:

Wow, this is a dirty dirty read, filled with secrets that are usually taken to ones grave, tangled dirty fingers reaching up and tainting all that it touches.

Four and a half stars, for sure.

Take a trip to a Mid-American, White Trash Holler, and experience they're life through the eyes of children, women and men, as fists fly at anything and anyone standing in ones way. Fibro housing with working electricity, sewerage and water the dream that most will never reach, or if they More...

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Jul 14, 2011

Jill rated it:

Trust me – you don’t want to live in Knockemstiff, Ohio, where the people are tough, life is tougher, and the air positively reeks of savagery.

Flat-out stunning, Donald Ray Pollock’s collection of short stories is not for the weak-of-stomach. The linked stories showcase down-and-out losers whose lives are a never-ending cycle of despair, brutality, and bleakness. Here are the drinkers, the speed freaks, the abusers, the borderline (and not so borderline) sociopaths, the profane.
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2 comments like (2 people liked it)

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