Pinckney Benedict

The stories in Miracle Boy and Other Stories are filled with grit, tragedy, beauty, cruelty and love, as well as the improbable, the fantastic, and the just plain strange. Not to mention madness. As the narrator says in Bridge of Sighs, “sometimes they go a little batty.” He’s referring to farmers whose cattle are killed by traveling extermination men to combat Gadrene Swine (a biblical plague). Affected most by the mass killings is the narrator, one exterminator’s young son who show more assists his father as he executes cattle by the dozens.

There’s the madness of the overworked cuckold farmer, of a man whose dead uncle is actually his father, of the middle son of a farm family who never quite fit in - the sole survivor of a methane accident. Many of the stories take place on farms. They link the never ending monotony and drudgery of farm work with insanity and flights of fancy. In The Beginnings of Sorrow, a man and his dog begin to change places, with repercussions that expand beyond their world.

Pig Helmet & The Wall of Life, with its tale of violent death, disfiguration, serpents, and biblical references is reminiscent of the work of Harry Crews.

There’s also beauty. Mercy, about what happens when miniature horses move in next to a working farm where a young boy lives, is a splash of sunlight in the collection. A potential dark side to the story is what accentuates the beauty.

Every story in Pinckney Benedict’s collection is genuine, original, and worth reading. show less

This describes so well (!), but, unfortunately, it failed to impress me. The story involves a large cast of characters, including a washed-up boxer, an old truck driver, a crooked sheriff, two high-level arms dealers, a religious recluse, and a sociopathic drug-lord who rules over a large compound deep in the West Virginia mountains. The chapters constantly shift focus among the various characters, until their paths eventually meet. I often enjoy this format in novels, but in this case, I show more found it jarring and irritating, partly because so many characters are being explored, but none of them are examined in depth.

The actual story lacks a wow factor too. There's much crime and some action, but no real suspense that I could detect. Despite exploring some crazy, interesting stuff, it's actually a bit dull and the writing is often wooden. While it seems like most of the parts are present to create a good story (particularly a well-drawn setting and some fascinating character types), it fails to come together in the end. This isn't absolutely awful, but I don't necessarily recommend it either. And it sounded so good when I read the description! show less

Took a while for me to get into this - the many characters were a little too seemingly disconnected. But by the book's end I'd really quite enjoyed it. The writing is excellent, Benedict certainly knows how to set it all up, and the dialogue is all too real. A very violent story.

Different should not be confused with interesting. The story is about a bare hand fighter, a crazy drug load, hillbilly pot, arms shipments migrant work crews, a religious hermit..... I could go on but won't. There is way to much detail, about things that this reader just didn't care about, while the characters themselves were boring, and flat. The author can clearly write, but he should try short stories and a long form with an interesting plot, and well developed characters, two things show more this book doesn't have. show less