WOUNDED BOARDERS

From the well-known Southern humorist, another fun house gallery of small-town misfits at the ends of their tethers.

As the nation’s, and the region’s, politics get ever more divided and mean, Singleton’s satire grows darker and sharper. Yet what makes it work, as always, is an essential sweetness and decency. These are people struggling, surrounded on every side by cruel or goofy absurdity, but they make sense where they can. It’s an upriver swim. The title story, for instance, features a house flipper named Celia, a mobile flea market, and a hook-handed man who’s founded a shuffleboard league for veterans missing limbs (they use weighted Skoal tobacco tins as pucks); the “Wounded Boarders” help Celia handle a stalker and restore her sense of community. In “Horace Poor, Horace Mint,” an ambitious high school student gets a summer job running a magnetic sweeper around roofing sites to pick up stray nails; then—at his numismatist father’s urging—starts running the sweeper in nearby woods during breaks to look for buried coins; he ends up mired for good in his hometown. It’s an origin story of stuckness. We meet a disgraced yearbook photographer who’s hunting revenge; a couple who lure “would-be burglars” to their homestead and then shoot them in the kneecaps; and many more. Singleton’s tales are discursive, spontaneous-feeling; they might go anywhere, end anywhere. A few short pieces feel like preliminary sketches, but the collection’s longest may be the finest individual story of Singleton’s career. It takes the form of a rambling epistle, hilarious and poignant, from a father to the 20-something daughter who’s just discovered he exists and that her "parents" are really her maternal grandparents, her mother, Lydia, having died in childbirth. The title is the final sentence Lydia spoke to her beloved, after being whisked away from college and from his life. Lydia calls from her hospital room when her ultraprotective mother nips out for a Fresca, and the couple make post-birth plans for a future that will never come to pass. Just as our narrator tells Lydia he loves her, the mother returns, and Lydia responds, “I know about childproofing.”

A Southern comic master in top form.