WICKEDNESS AND FOLLY

Whitley’s nine stories are rife with raging violence, revenge, and shady characters.

This collection’s grim, malevolent tone is set with the opening story, “Bear Trap,” about a man who, after miraculously walking away unscathed from the six gunshots his girlfriend blasted at him, goes to desperate lengths to score heroin. Death is a recurring theme throughout, as is a callous attitude toward it. In “A Reasonable Amount of Trouble,” when a man named Cutter gets shot in a motel room fiasco involving a meth shipment and cash and later dies, his criminal partner, Grisly, stares “placidly at Cutter’s corpse who is gawking, jaw broken of hinges, at the ceiling with something of profound curiosity.” In one of the shortest pieces, “Company of Awful,” a woman’s father, who has contracted rabies from her dog, is shot and killed by her boyfriend, who then enlists her amphetamine-seeking drug-addict ex to help chop the man’s body up (which is already “partially butchered” by a machete) in exchange for drug money. Turning his lens to a murky bar scene in “The Chainthrower,” the author evocatively writes of “whores making their appointed rounds, holding cigarettes like little wands,” and describes an energy shift (“electrically charged, like the standing of hair before the strike of lightning”) moments before a vicious brawl breaks out. Whitley has a knack for crafting gritty, sharp-edged scenes with clipped sentences that spike the tension and capture the frenetic, unstable characters on the fringes of society. However, the stories lack variety and suffer from a general anticlimactic aimlessness as the characters, for the most part, remain stuck in the same ruts they started in. A prevailing sense of emotional disconnection makes it challenging, even for readers with a soft spot for unlikeable, morally corrupt characters, to invest in the stories, and that may be the biggest issue here.

A chilling, desolate short-story collection with rare splinters of light.