Let the story do the talking is the mantra that Scott McClanahan follows. And it serves him well.

This collection of seventeen short stories reads more like a conversation with a fellow patron in a rundown bar along the side of a road in West Virginia. The prose is sparse, cut to the bone, and makes no attempts to dazzle the reader with clever wordplay. McClanahan is confident enough in the tale not to wallpaper it – the grit and the grime will keep you locked in for the duration.

Often a story will kick off as if the reader sat down midway through the narrator’s diatribe.

“And then there was the time my Dad got into it at a NASCAR race in Charlotte.”

It gives the stories a great conversational aspect, where the narrator is really having a talk with the reader, telling him the story of his life.

As for the stories themselves, there is great pain in these tales of the downtrodden, heaps of regret, but also a great black humor that arises when one realizes you’re so completely screwed what else can you do but laugh. And of course there’s great heart in McClanahan’s stories, yet it never drifts into being sappy or cliché. Both “The Prettiest Girl in Texas” and “Poopdeck Pappy” are great examples of how McClanahan can take a single incident, line it with slivers of humor and satire, but also render pure heartbreak for the main characters involved. Then there are stories like “ODB, The Mud Puppy, and Me” where the narrative drifts from folk tale to absurd comedy to bloody horror as the parties involved try render an act of kindness on a suffering animal.

That story really gets to the heart of McClanahan’s bent with this collection: that life can be absurd and horrific, and often even your best intentions will make a mess of things. In these postcards from West Virginia and small towns throughout the south, the characters usually can’t see how the road is going to twist in front of them, and most are inevitably thrown. But in the author’s honest storytelling, that never editorializes, who are we to judge them?