Despair and resistance

Kyle Minor's second collection of short stories follows the success of his first, In the Devil's Territory, with acclaim. It is a beautiful work—and one that I believe promises more than it delivers.

Minor is a gifted writer with a facility for the bizarre and the dark, and he keeps an empathetic insider's eye as he wends his way through American fundamentalist Christianity, contemporary Appalachia, missionary Haiti, and the dystopian future. His individual stories, which sustain an amazing variety of voice, could each stand alone. But they also lightly cross-reference one another as the book progresses, providing a subtle but illuminating backdrop behind the work as a whole. I got whiffs of Raymond Carver, Stephen King, and the postmodern graphic novel. These are signs of a dextrous and pioneering storyteller.

A faint pattern emerges in Minor’s loose meta-narrative: the lives, disasters, and delusions of a highly conservative, quasi-charismatic American Christianity and its fallout. A flair for the sickening abounds in this realm; but, speaking as a former Pentecostal with West Virginia kin, that's certainly not all there is to it. Minor knows this. But while there are times when the tale flows masterfully, there are others when you wish Minor would cut it out already with the firehose.