Country Hardball
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
After more than a decade spent in and out of juvenile detention, halfway houses, and jail, Roy Alison returns to his rural hometown determined to do better, to be better. But what he finds is a working-class community devastated by the economic downturn--a town without anything to hold onto but the past.
Staying with his grandmother, Roy discovers a family history of good intentions and bad choices, of making do without much chance of doing better. Around him, families lose their sons to war, hunting accidents, drugs. And Roy, along with the town, falls into old patterns established generations ago.
A novel-in-stories in the tradition of Bonnie Jo Campbell, Donald Ray Pollock, Denis Johnson, and Alan Heathcock, Country Hardball is a powerfully observed and devastatingly understated portrait of the American working class.
"Steve Weddle's Country Hardball is a perfect combination of the brokenhearted and the just flat broke... Here's hoping Weddle never stops writing..." --Benjamin Whitmer, author of Pike
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ex-con Roy Alison would like to go straight, but he can't seem to make up for past mistakes, and his only options are just more bad choices. Weddle's debut novel is a suspenseful series of interrelated stories of tragedy, despair, and hopelessness in a rural Southern town. There is no joy here, as Weddle paints a vivid, depressing picture of a blue-collar community crushed by economic collapse and endemic substance abuse with characters, events, and dialogue that seem all too real. Roy easily drifts back into a world of violence and crime with his worthless cousin, Cleovis, but still harbors a desire to do right. As folks mourn for sons killed in Iraq and struggle with unemployment, Roy becomes involved in helping to carry out a string of crimes that gradually turn out to be connected. These are gritty stories of people facing nothing but bad options, though Roy eventually manages to make something good come from his situation. The most powerful image, however, is Weddle's description of an old lady who keeps all her hopes in a little box one that's empty.
