From: Out of the Woods by Chris Offutt. Simon & Shuster, 1999.
When a self-described drunk is locked out of the house, he assumes his recovering-alcholic girlfriend has become fed up with him. After walking the streets of Casper, Wyoming for an hour, pondering the dismal state of his life, he decides to throw a chunk of rubble through a plate glass window to get the attention of a passing patrol car as well as that of his girlfriend, who listens obsessively to a police scanner.
A native of Kentucky currently teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Offutt's stories are terse, compelling, and marked by an unflinching bleak outlook.
1 comment:
Nice to see you branch out from what is usually considered to be the canon of crime fiction. Writers like Offutt, Larry Brown, William Gay, Daniel Woodrell, etc., who traffic in what has come to be called Southern gothic or, in the case of Woodrell, "country noir," are writing some of the most interesting stories out there, and I fear that people too hemmed in by notions of genre are passing them over needlessly.
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