Kernel-Sized Tales

Detail from cover

I'm up for skinny books, but I don't feel that's a bad thing. There are great gorillas of books that have drawn my heat. I love Don Quixote and Bleak House and John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, but usually, when I reach for a read, I like heavily contemplated slender volumes—the kind that take an afternoon to get through and a lifetime to mull over. Perhaps it's a generational trait; perhaps it's my lifestyle. My hours are accounted for before dawn takes the sky. I teach seven classes per semester, work on the editorial staff of two magazines, have a newborn to raise, am constantly fighting off my social-networking-site addiction, and am generally nursing a hangover. On top of that, I live with preacher's-son shame. All that I do is some version of sinning. My turning to books is for two reasons. 1) Books, to me, are a secular religion. They give me philosophy. They breathe birth against my brain. 2) Accomplishment. In many ways I read to be well read. It's the same reason why baseball fans memorize stats. They feel powerful knowing. I feel powerful when I'm able to discuss book with my friends and my colleagues. But with all of my time sucked into various endeavors, I find it increasingly hard to muscle down goliath texts. I have several big books eyeballing me from my bookshelves. I'll admit I'm afraid of them. They might split my fragile ego. Leave me bruised. Render me busted. Admittedly size is hardly what writers aim for (except when it is). Writers don't care what form their brilliance comes in, so long as it comes. And in order to be brilliant, a writer must be read—not by everyone, but by someone. I fancy myself a supporter of the arts. So if a writer has a glimmer of the fantastic and a pension for brevity, then my mind is venue for their voices. Like all readers, I want to be dazzled. But unless your name's Charles Dickens, then please don't take your sweet ass time.

So I was all butterflies and bubblegum when I first palmed Glenn Blake's sophomore collection Return Fire. The book is as precise and solid as a pebble. In just seven kernel-sized tales, in a book the width of a cigarette's circumference, Blake is able to pack enough nostalgia to make ninty-year-olds' knees buckle, stop their hearts, send them on to that farther dance hall. In language as heavy as humidity, with rhythms slow and steady as tides Blake turns an eye to East Texas, to the bayous that lurch with brackish water, to a hurricane coast so often decimated, to land forever subsiding.

Fans of Blake's debut Drowned Moon (2002) are already familiar with Blake's merging river milieu. They have seen his half-grotesque humans with their hearts misplaced or fading. They have witnessed the ache of a butchered masculinity clinging limp in the Texas trees. They have seen children with no sunshine. They have seen storms reign murderous wrath.

Rejoice. Blake brings pain again.

The opening story—the title story—"Return Fire" is a reckoning out of a black gilded Bible. Two blonde-haired athletes wreak havoc in the bayou. Misguided, uneducated, entitled by small-town athletic celebrity and armed with a .22 rifle, the two football stars are tromping the wetlands making murder on livestock, mescal bottles, and virtually anything else that comes into sight. A man pays witness to their brutality, and he doesn't like what he sees. He's got a mescal buzz and a score to settle. He's got a wife in the grave, and a bigger gun than the blonde heads.

I see you, he says. Don't you worry. He slams a shell into the chamber. He turns his baseball cap around. He looks through...