Road to Bobby Joe and Other Stories

by Louis Berney

A collection of short stories captures a group of ordinary people who become caught up in circumstances that cause them to act in extraordinary ways

182 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1991

Reviews

[Hank Stuever · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still remember the brilliance of "In the Weeds." Everyone who went to college with the author (which sort of includes me, in a mutual-crowd sense) was over the moon when Lou got a short story in The New Yorker and a book of stories published. Our world was smaller then. To share gossip and news about one another, we wrote letters and made phone calls. And with no small amount of pride, we went to our local bookstores and requested that they stock some copies of our friend-of-a-friend's book. "The Road to Bobby Joe" is still on my shelf, a souvenir of that time.

Life is long and success is an up-and-down journey: Check out Lou Berney's much more recent and highly entertaining crime novels: "Gutshot Straight" and "Whiplash River."

[OMalleycat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very early Lou Berney short stories and he had already developed his masterful grasp of character and setting. Some stories are great, others perhaps a bit immature in his desire to reach for big revelations rather than small moments. A good read.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pretty good collection of off-center stories, unusual for the most part for their settings than for anything else. A few, like "Christmas Eve at the OK Naked Corral" focus on dialog, this one is a conversation between strippers in a strip joint. Strong stories include "In the Weeds," about a Cambodian busboy who is misunderstood and mistreated in the Oklahoma restaurant in which he works and finally cracks. Also good are "One Hundred Foreskins," about an Indian slaughterhouse worker pursuing a rich girl (it's an old idea but it works here), and "Swimming," about an old white man reliving his childhood memories in a neighborhood now run down and populated by all blacks. Not as good were "This is a Band" and "All God's Pets."