Rust and Bone
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant and urgent debut collection by a young writer exploring the darkest corners of human experience.
In steel-tipped prose, Craig Davidson conjures a savage world populated by prizefighters, gamblers, sex addicts, and a disappearing magician. Dogs fight to the death, and in desperate arenas men with broken hands slug it out in bouts that have less to do with sport than with survival. Yet the hostility of Davidson's fictional universe is tempered by the humanity he invests in his characters, by his subtle awareness of their motivation, and by his eye for telling detail.
Endorsed by Bret Easton Ellis and by Chuck Palahniuk, Rust and Bone explores violence, masculinity and life on the most extreme of margins.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A strong stomach, an open mind and a morbid sense of humor are essential to enjoying Davidson's accomplished, macabre first collection. Calamity lurks around every corner, these stories suggest, and you never know when fate will smite you only that it will. Davidson catapults his characters (sex addicts, fighters, gamblers and drinkers) into ingeniously grim situations that test their will. In "Rocket Ride," a young man who loses his leg to the orca he performs with in a marine park show tries to rebuild his life, in part by attending meetings of the Unlimbited Potential support group, which is full of substance-abusing amputees who wonder if karma's to blame for their plights. In the gruesome "A Mean Utility," a normal-seeming couple an ad exec and his wife, a nurse breed and fight vicious dogs, while in the sad "On Sleepless Roads," a repo man leaves one night's job not with the camper he was supposed to reclaim, but with the destitute man's hamster and guinea pig, which he brings home to his disabled wife. Davidson, 30, is a fine young writer with a keen sense of the absurd and a bracing, biting wit, but his focus on gore may keep many readers from appreciating his obvious talent.
