Knockemstiff v. Eden

A friend loaned me a collection called Knockemstiff, by an Ohioan named Donald Ray Pollock. I was initially retiscent: "What, Raymond Carver stories, only Appalachian? If I wanted that, I'd look out my window."

But Mr. Pollock has an amazing ear for dialogue and a knowledge of the godforsaken hillbilly demimonde that will likely [hopefully] remain unsurpassed. All dads in the little town of Knockemstiff, OH, beat their kids, everyone is taking black beauties and drinking constantly, and, if you dare to have a beautiful thought, keep it to your damn self.

One of those cats who worked in a factory for a zillion years before taking up his pen, Pollock has a bottomless well of rural awfulness from which he draws, and yet, when things seem unremittingly bleak, he comes out with a finely honed phrase or picked-up bit of colloquial speech that is the hallmark of a natural:

I was in Frankie Johnson's car, a canary-yellow '69 Super-Bee that could shit
and get.

Or:

For most of that week, they'd been smoking on a big block of mildewed Lebanese
hash that a logger had sold them for practically nothing because it made
people's gums bleed. The floor of the fishcamp was sticky with bloody spit.

Previous to this book, I was having a breezy-enough re-read of The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway, not a super-uplifting novel at all, with all its gender hijinx, infidelity and encroaching madness. Still, after passages like the above, it is quite pleasant to return to a world where this is more of the milieu:

The waiter brought them glasses of manzanilla from the lowland near Cadiz called
the Marismas with thin slices of jamon serrano, a smoky, hard cured ham from
pigs that fed on acorns, and bright red spicy salchichon, and another even
spicier dark sausage from a town called Vich and anchovies and garlic
olives.

also, for comparison's sake:
http://www.weather.com/weather/local/USOH0184?from=search_morecities

http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/local/SPXX0017?from=enhsearch_loc