Praise for VOLT

“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

 

“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.

-Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone and Tomato Red

“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 

 

“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 judgement 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 The Quick and the Dead and Taking Care 

 

“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 

 

“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

About VOLT

A blistering new collection of stories from an exhilarating new voice.

One man kills another after neither will move his pickup truck from the road. A female sheriff in a flooded town attempts to cover up a murder. When a farmer harvesting a field accidentally runs over his son, his grief sets him off walking, mile after mile. A band of teens bent on destruction runs amok in a deserted town at night. As these men and women lash out at the inscrutable churn of the world around them, they find a grim measure of peace in their solitude.

Throughout VOLT, Alan Heathcock’s stark realism is leavened by a lyric energy that matches the brutality of the surface. And as you move through the wind-lashed landscape of these stories, faint signs of hope appear underfoot. In Volt, the work of a writer who’s hell-bent on wrenching out whatever beauty this savage world has to offer, Heathcock’s tales of lives set afire light up the sky like signal flares touched off in a moment of desperation.

To be published by Graywolf Press, March 1, 2011.