George Singleton (1)

The best story collection I’ve read this year. Sharp, wicked humor – each story is packed with brilliance. Set in the fictional Calloustown, S.C., the stories intertwine themes, settings, names. There are couples that have divorced, couples that should divorce but don’t, people with strange obsessions, and people that are just strange – and wonderful.

Worm’s Bar makes an appearance in several stories. “Worm had a new piece of plywood next to his door that advertised TOPLESS, which show more meant he’d be in there behind the bar not wearing a shirt.” A family lives in a cave. “When you see a door on the ground with a knob sticking out, you’re at the Massey’s place.”

His characters are otherworldly good. A wife that orgasms to sad things. An “adjunct professor of Morse code over at Eminent Domain College.” A man that is the world record holder for being stung by bald-faced hornets.

Common themes are people trying to get in the Guinness World Records book ("Most people call it the Guinness Book of World Records, but they’re wrong”) and the obsession that General Sherman hadn’t deemed Calloustown important enough to burn.

I’ll be seeking out more of George Singleton’s writing. show less

The stories follow Mendal Dawes pretty much chronologically through his boyhood in Forty-Five, South Carolina, a town of “cheating, lying, and stealing business and civic leaders,” a town from which he longs to escape, and is encouraged to escape. Questionably raised by his highly eccentric father, Mendal might be the smartest person in town. “I wasn’t three years old before I’d done about everything scary outside of flying upside down in a crop duster or shaking hands with show more Republicans.”

His clairvoyant dad purloins or obtains all manner of junk and buries it in the back yard so Mendal can sell it later after a large increase in value. He buries fake toxic waste barrels on land behind their house to play a trick on future developers. But it’s not all fun and games. “My father, in an attempt to make me know that people lived differently than we did, went out of his way to find albinos, one-armed men, burn victims, waterheads, and vegetarians for me to meet.”

In a couple of stories Mendal has returned to town as a mostly functioning adult, but it doesn’t seem permanent. These stories bring back a simpler time when endemic racism, corruption, poverty and drunk drivers were the main things to worry about in the south. The humor is sharp and wicked with little diamonds sprinkled throughout. As always, George Singleton’s writing is a joy to read. show less

These are stories that have appeared in George Singleton’s previous collections and in various publications; basically his greatest hits. Singleton’s South Carolina and his fictional towns are gloriously ridiculous. Calloustown, for instance, is a place where the citizens feel slighted to this day because General Sherman didn’t feel it worthy to be destroyed during his march, and so passed it by.

Several of the stories feature observant and thoughtful boys and young men who feel out of show more place and intuitively know that they need to leave their small town as soon as possible and not return. Others feature grown men who feel out of place in their small town but haven’t left and never will. Others feature men who have moved to a small town and feel out of place. There’s a theme.

“Fresh Meat on Wheels,” one of the out of place adolescent boy tales, is one of his best. In “Outlaw Head and Tail” a “pre-bouncer” in a bar keeps the peace with words of wisdom from the television show Bonanza. A couple of the stories explain why the narrator’s wife will become his ex-wife at some point. The cause usually seems to be because he just can’t seem to fit into society and fly right. Definitely a theme.

There are wickedly funny moments that pop out of each of these stories, and quite often. And like all good humor, the absurdity is surrounded and enhanced by the gravity of the situation. George Singleton, documenting his version of the south, is one of the best writers going now. show less

George Singleton's stories are sublime, ridiculous, funny and serious, usually all at once. A lost father takes his son on a tour to meet women who could have been his mother. A couple prank obnoxious frat boys at a lake house. A woman meets a man who might be of her dreams at a contest to see who can keep a hand on an RV the longest.

Racists, preachers, his own hapless, hard-luck protagonists all get their due, but gently. Old age and death are creeping into Singleton's stories now, or maybe show more they were always there. He leavens the sadness of life with humor. It's part of the fabric of his writing, except for the last story, Everything's Wild, in which a widower appears to be sliding into dementia due to grief, but there's more to it. Singleton plays it straight in that one, while acknowledging that most of us try to do our best, but don't always pull it off. show less