In the title story, the unnamed narrator muses late at night about all the other Ohioans watching the same Charlie Chan movie on the local TV channel. The people of Knockemstiff may be overworked and tired, but they can dream. Although Pollock’s Ohio is darker than Anderson’s, intense loneliness and despair are omnipresent in each. While the legend to the latter’s map notes the offices of the local newspaper and the idyllic-sounding Waterworks Pond, the Knockemstiff map starkly highlights the town dump and the dwellings of a dim-witted character named Wimpy. Reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Pollock’s collection offers a map of Knockemstiff in its opening pages. If by some stroke of luck they do succeed in breaking free of the town, it is usually only to wind up in other, distant margins. Many characters who try to escape Knockemstiff end up hours later back where they started. Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection Knockemstiff begins with an epigraph from satirist Dawn Powell: “All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.” And yet, when it comes to Knockemstiff, Ohio-Pollock’s hometown and the purgatorial setting for these eighteen gritty stories-the fictional inhabitants rarely leave.
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