Readers may have encountered ten of the twelve stories collected here in periodicals such as Esquire, New Letters, and The Missouri Review, or in anthologies such as A Hell of a Woman, Men From Boys, and Bloodlines. I can imagine that when nestled in amongst other voices in these publications, Woodrell's distinctive prose bites the reader like a snake hiding in a woodpile. His first-person Ozark narratives are hard to mistake as belonging to any other author, and their matter of fact recounting of violence among hardscrabble people bring a lot of weight to the brief pages of each story.

The collection's tone is set not just by the first story, but by the first sentence of the first story: "Once Boshell finally killed his neighbor he couldn't seem to quit killing him." It's a story which establishes both the physical boundaries and the boundaries of expected behavior of the Ozark hollows Woodrell lives in and writes about (most famously in his book and the film made from it, Winter's Bone). The stories that follow include rape, arson, PTSD, more murder, guns, knives, and plenty of tough lives. Most are contemporary, although several duck back in time: one to a racial murder in the 1920s or 30s, and the story "Woe To Live On", about a Dutch bushwhacker riding with Quantril's Raiders during the Civil War. (This latter story was expanded to a book of the same name which became the basis for the 1999 film Ride With the Devil.)

When gathered together in this collection, Woodrell's characters lose a bit of their distinctiveness and power. As a result, the stories are probably best read slowly, perhaps one a week or so. Not every one is successful, but they all mark Woodrell as one of the best writers we have at this time and comparisons to Cormac McCarthy are hard to avoid. I'll definitely be seeking out other books of his.