Heathcock's impressive debut collection pursues modern American prairie characters through some serious Old Testament muck. If it's not flood or fire ravishing the village of Krafton, then it's fratricide, pedocide, or just plain ol' stranger killing. In the National Magazine Award–winning "Peacekeeper," middle-aged grocery store manager Helen Farraley becomes the town's first sheriff and cuts her teeth on a missing-child case. When snow tracks lead her to discover the girl's grim fate, Helen skirts the law so that "the unrighteous cause of her death kept a gracious unknown." In "Smoke," the sins of the father visit 15-year-old Vernon when his war vet father drags him out of bed to cremate the man he's killed. In the suspenseful "The Daughter," we watch the sins drip down the maternal line, as well. Misery is in plentiful supply throughout these dark, thickly atmospheric tales of spiritual desolation and savagery. Fans of William Gay and Daniel Woodrell will savor these stories where sin and suffering shroud the hope of redemption. (Mar.)
The stories in Volt are intense, suspenseful, and utterly compelling. Heathcock writes about violence and bad luck and bad choices with a cool, grim eye that recalls Cormac McCarthy, yet he also approaches the hard lives of his stoic Westerners with great empathy and compassion and heart—a kind of miraculous combination. By turns hair-raising and tender, the tales in this collection draw you into a tough, bleak, beautiful world that you won't soon forget.” —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply
“Alan Heathcock is an epic storyteller—and Volt is an epic collection. You will come away from each of these majestic stories thrilled, alternately terrified and heartened, ultimately full of wonder at how the author manages to make twenty pages so timeless, so deep and sweeping—every story like a novel writ small.” —Benjamin Percy, author of The Wilding and Refresh, Refresh
“Volt is booming, cracking good. Heathcock's characters are trying to make things right, whether they're busting up a town, avenging the grief of a mother, or trying to live with the self-imposed judgment of loyalty or remorse. Guilt and grace are the pillars of this excellent collection, and there are no stronger or more mysterious pillars than those.” —Joy Williams, author of Honored Guest and The Quick and the Dead
“This is a big, ravishing, commanding story collection. Heathcock presents a riveting portrait of an imaginary town called Krafton: through its streets and farms and minds spin questions about civilization and wilderness, lawkeeping and lawlessness, faith and faithlessness. Each story in its way shows how we reverberate after tragedy, and how we try—and sometimes fail—to vibrate our way back toward equilibrium. Volt is (dare I say it?) electrifying.” —Anthony Doerr, author of Memory Wall and The Shell Collector
“In the tradition of Breece D'J Pancake and Kent Meyers, Alan Heathcock turns his small town into a big canvas. Like the tales in Winesburg, Ohio, the stories in Volt are full of violence and regret, and the sad desperation of the grotesque.” —Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing
“Alan Heathcock's voice is the American voice, doing what it was meant to do. It's full of distance and wind, highways and heart. He's the real deal.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Into the Beautiful North
“The stories in Volt are rich in surprise moments of brightness and bleakness, told in strong straight sentences. Alan Heathcock has a cowpoke's eye for the bloom and detritus of the landscape, and language that puts one right there in the picture, banging through the greasewood, the cornfield, crossing the flats and sudden gullies. These are tough and potent stories, deeply felt and imagined. Heathcock is a writer who goes without flinching into the darker corners of human experience, but has the grace to bring any available light with him.” —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply
“Alan Heathcock's Volt is simply masterful. Its weave of stories is heart-filling and breath-stopping and his language achingly spare and yet, mysteriously generous, kind and luxurious. Take your time when you read it and then read it again.” —Robert Olmstead, author of Far Bright Star
“Alan Heathcock doesn't so much write stories as fire them like bullets-they speed into the reader's consciousness and zip toward an impact that feels both stunning and irreversible. These are stories that arrive fast, hit hard, and linger.” —Keith Lee Morris, author of The Dart League King
This debut collection is a high-voltage reading experience one won't soon forget. The stories are set in an imaginary American town called Krypton that has a prairielike feeling of desolation and high wind. Several are driven by an unnatural death that takes place outside of the narrative frame, and often outside of the law, and the enveloping grief—as unpredictable as the weather—dictates the actions to come. A father sets off on a walk across several states after accidentally mowing down his son with his tractor. A middle-aged woman whose elderly mother has been killed in a hit-and-run accident is possessed of a manic energy that frightens her own daughter. A veteran of a war characterized by great expanses of sand goes AWOL in a cow pasture. VERDICT Heathcock is a writer to watch; each of these subtle stories will thrill readers with an element of surprise that will make them want to go back and see how it happened and what they missed along the way.—Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA
Raw and rugged, the stories in Heathcock's collection push up against the sharp edge of a world where people live and die, and find any redemption hard-won and sometimes bittersweet.
The book encompasses eight stories, all centered around the fictional town of Krafton and its people, with many of the pieces informing one another. Several characters appear in multiple stories, most notably the town sheriff, Helen Farraley. The collection opens with "The Staying Freight," an affecting tale of guilt and burnt-out acceptance. Winslow Nettles, "as sure a thing as a farmer could be," accidentally kills his young son by running him over with a tiller disk. Nettles walks away from his farm, traveling afoot until he's taken in at a nameless town, only to become part of a freak show. "Smoke" sifts through the aftermath of a killing, one occurring after two trucks meet on an isolated one-lane road and neither driver will give way. "Peacekeeper" follows Sheriff Farraley as she copes with a flood and with the angst of a child-murder. She contrives to make the murder appear to be an accident but then brings vigilante justice to the killer. In "The Daughter," a grieving woman cuts a maze into her corn field, and a little boy goes missing, with guilt enough to cover more than one person involved. Vernon Hamby, a Baptist pastor, appears in several stories, most affectingly in "Lazarus." "Volt," the title story which ends the book, is particularly remarkable for its portrayal of the Delmore clan, a modern family akin to the Snopes of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Heathcock's work is starkly realistic, and his writing is clear and concise and regularly relies on simple declarative sentences. The compendium offers readers a Spoon River Anthology–like sense of place and people, with characters radiating authenticity and coping with fate and folly in an entirely believable manner.
Heathcock has earned a National Magazine Award for his fiction. This book affirms that promise.
…impressive…Heathcock's prose, spare and muscular yet poetic, fits the foreboding, God-fearing nature of the stories…Frankly, there is little to fault in any of the eight stories that make up this collection. Undoubtedly, there is much grit and violence in this world, but there is also an abundance of tenderness and compassion. Heathcock displays a generosity of spirit that only those writers who love their characters can summon, and Volt is galvanizing proof of his talent.
—The New York Times
