Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Reading this book of nine short stories by Wells Tower was an unexpected

experience. His way with language hit me like a ton of bricks and I bet you I could open that book at any page and hit on a sentence that is a masterpiece of strung-together adjectives, nouns and verbs. His characters are mostly the type of Americans I don’t care for but I like the way he writes about them.The New York Times describes his writing as “the intersection between hotheads and cool customers.” This debut collection is comprised of stories that have appeared elsewhere but most of them have been heavily revised for this book.

Here are three passages picked at random from different stories by opening the book and pointing at the page:

I’d read in the papers about a woman who died near here under strange circumstances. She’d disappeared one weekend, camping with her husband. The papers painted it like he’d killed her, but just before the police booked him, a hunter had shot a black bear with part of the lady’s hat in its stomach, a funny kind of good news for the widower.

                                            ************** 

As a young liar, you can generally get pretty far on the assumption that adults have more important things to worry about than catching out a kid for every little fraud he tries to pull. But your stepfather seems to have plenty of time to study and doubt everything that comes out of your mouth. He will spend days gathering evidence to prove that those are your teeth marks on a pen you said you hadn’t chewed. Your hatred of your stepfather is all-consuming and unceasing, but this is only because your world is still small, and your stepfather assumes an outsize significance in the story of your life. 

                                          ***************  

The bell on the cat’s collar roused her. He’d brought her something: a baby pigeon stolen from its nest, mauled and draped on Jacey’s pillowcase. The thing was pink, nearly translucent, with magenta cheeks and lavender ovals around the eyes. It looked like a half-cooked eraser with dreams of someday becoming a prostitute. 

                                         ***************  

I admit that the book is a bit of a downer but I appreciated every phrase I read and I tore through it in record time.