EYESORES

Shade’s diagram of southwest Pennsylvania—in the form of 11 stories set in and around the town of Windfall—wins this year’s Flannery O’Connor award.

Windfall is a place where for ten bucks men will “take a cup filled with Skoal spit and cigarette ashes. Swish it around like a rich-bitch wine taster, and in one shot swallow it all.” In “Blood,” a young man tags along on a deer hunt with his cuckolded uncle, the man who is cuckolding him, and a stripper daughter for a possible revenge killing and a lesson in the politics of small-town love. A more straightforward love story is “The Heart Hankers,” about a young wife and her janitor husband who looks like a retired elf and who might have fallen from the sky. In “A Rage Forever,” Big Al is the near-mythical high-schooler who will lead a gang of delinquents through fights and into lore. A couple who’ve lived together for three years are anything but stable (“Stability”) when it turns out her pregnancy isn’t his responsibility. “The Last Night of the County Fair” is about the late-season adventures of a pair of teenagers avoiding their weirdo parents as they wander Pennsylvania in search of girls. And in the title story, a group of men about to tear down an old drive-in for a bit of pay are happy with their tools but headed for disaster—though not before our narrator reflects on his life and the drive-in: “But looking at the screen now I thought how small I was. And how Cincinnati and California and the rest of the world were really far away.” Shade has the voice down—his people dream of futures that involve UFOs and time machines. They know of other places but ultimately, it seems, are stuck and fated. When one person says to another, “We could leave Windfall,” the response is: “I think Windfall’s about left us, Gus.”

A tough, unforgiving portrait of shallow small-town folk who have heard only the gossip on nobility.