The Most Horrible Fiction You Will Read This Year

Modernist writing and sheer awfulness. Tells you what kind of a reader I am that this makes The Spot by David Means compelling to me:

David Means, the author of three highly regarded story collections, is more the regionalist here, albeit one of a highly sophisticated, formally aggressive order. In long, lyric sentences, thick with nested clauses and parallel constructions, adding up to some enormous paragraphs, he depicts a mythic Rust Belt populated by a menacing subculture of drifters, bank robbers, terrorists, and pimps, many of whom would not be far out of place on the pages of regionalist heroes of the southern-gothic variety.

The book really finds its harrowing tone, though, in a particularly lurid couple of tales featuring crucifixions. In “Oklahoma,” a drifter with aspirations to directing films tortures an old farmer, then blows up a farmhouse, and finally, en route from the crime, hatches a plan to crucify the farmer’s mentally disabled granddaughter, who’s fallen under his sway. “Crucifixion is the top crime, man,” he tells his accomplice and lover, heading down the dark highway. “You nail the palms, you crown the head with thorns, and let slow, natural death take over. The guy up there is high as hell on opiates. Doesn’t feel a thing.” The story ends before the deed has been done, but judging from the atmosphere of doom permeating most of Means’s tales, one guesses it won’t be long coming.

Ahh. That’s the stuff.

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