Woodrell’s snapshots of life in Ozarks cut to the bone

Daniel Woodrell

Sceptre, £8.99

E-book: $7.51

Review Billy O’Callaghan

Cormac McCarthy’s Tex-Mex borderland explorations and Annie Proulx’s rendering of Wyoming’s wild and wildest show us that a century on from its west being won, America remains a nation rich in dark corners.

For the past 25 years, Daniel Woodrell’s fictional territory has been the Ozarks, the rugged slice of Missouri mountain country that has shaped him since birth. Across eight novels, it has proven a vein worth mining, culminating in his 2006 Winter’s Bone, which finally broke America’s best-kept or most grievously overlooked literary secret to the watching world.

Delivered in language that reveals its delicacy only by insinuation, each of the stories in The Outlaw Album, Mr Woodrell’s first collection, takes hold within a sentence or two. And whether considered individually or as a whole, the stark realism of the work aims to mark with permanence.

A girl reduces her paedophile uncle to an infant state by cleaving his head in with a mattock pick, and is forced to attend his every need until time starts to heal him and the old evil shows signs of stirring once more.

A man burns down a recently-built neighbour’s house, sacrificing himself to another stint in prison, so that his dying father can, once more, enjoy a view of the river. A shopkeeper is consumed by suspicion and paranoia in the years following his only daughter’s abduction. In Night Stand, a poignant reflection on the lasting effects of war, a Vietnam veteran wakes in the night to find a naked man at the foot of his bed, and in over-reaction stabs him to death. The dead man is identified as the son of a one-time friend, a soldier traumatised by a stint in Iraq.

And plundering not only the title but the fodder of his own second novel, which provided the basis for Ang Lee’s acclaimed 1999 film, Ride with the Devil, the collection reaches a striking climax with Woe To Live On. The author reveals, through a broken half- or misremembered narrative, the story of Jake Roedel: a one-time Confederate soldier and sometime sidekick of Cole Younger, now descended into obscurity and old age, who has become a figure of shame in his son’s eyes for the brutal past he seems to both symbolise and glorify.

The result is a striking revision of the American Civil War and the Wild West mythos, and a deep consideration of such paper-thin notions as heroism, bravery and honour.

The Outlaw Album is a collection of short stories that offer bite-sized versions of the author’s bleak, brutal and always captivating vision, and the sheer, raw power of his renowned, jabbing prose loses nothing in distillation. Rather, it is in glimpses that these 12 tales find their power. Delivered in a voice as rich and thick with authenticity as any found this side of William Faulkner, Woodrell unfurls a parade of small people and their half-broke lives, each one shaped, and usually cracked, by the aftermath of some tragedy, but enduring, keeping on, as if breath itself, or simple existence, is its own reward.