[This collection of exemplary short fiction is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Patrick Michael Finn
2011, Black Lawrence Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
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| C4 Ratings...out of | 10 |
|---|---|
| Language..... | 10 |
| Entertainment..... | 8 |
| Depth..... | 10 |
Patrick Michael Finn’s award-winning second story collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, depicts the grim industrial nightmare and post-industrial hell of Joliet, Illinois. Think of Dante’s Inferno and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” shuffled together and you begin to get a picture of just how grim this world is, and how pitilessly Finn depicts it, while still making us care about these characters stuck in their blighted urban Ninth Circle of Hell. But when the damned are stuck in hell together, they do hellish things to each other, and nothing namby-pamby like the infernal and eternal talkers of Sartre’s No Exit. No, these are all-American sinners, who take no prisoners, and have no pity for themselves, so why should they have any for their victims?
So in the course of the opening story, “Smokestack Polka,” a kid whose father has died of a heart attack on his walk home from his job at the Joliet railyards tries to kill the loathsome wife- beating thug who tries to put the moves on his mother, six months after his father’s death, at his cousin Reenie’s wedding. The brick the unnamed narrator on the roof hurls down at Tomczak barely misses its target, and Tomczak takes the incident for an accident and concludes the story with, “But let’s get the hell out of here. This fucking place is falling apart,” which, whether Tomczak realizes it or not, pretty much describes all the lives depicted in this powerful collection. …
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