Kick in the Head
Stories
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In stories that are as diverting as they are disconcerting, Steven Rinehart plumbs the psyche of that most perplexing beast: the American male. Set against a stark Midwestern landscape dotted with trailers, guns, cars, and crashed, these are deftly crafted and oddly resonant portraits of men behaving badly and men who have it bad—usually at the same time.
A Boy Scout struggles through a bizarre boys-to-men ritual. A man starts a love affair with a diabetic who prefers booze to insulin. Another man who's finally enjoying his first sex-only relationship destroys it by clinging to a white lie. From the high school teacher battling his attraction to a troubled student to the patron who becomes a conspirator in a violent outburst in a bar, these are guys who have a lot to learn and seem to insist on doing so the hard way. Linked throughout the collection in surprising ways, Rinehart's stories ultimately form a cohesive work that introduces his as a writer of striking vision and offers a sharp-focus snapshot of men who need a kick in the head—and get it when they least expect it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From childhood days at camp to barhopping nights as adults, men who do not want to grow up and women at least as peculiar find inventive ways to hurt each other in this quirky, affecting debut collection. "On the sixth day of her hunger strike," the first of 12 short stories begins, "Lydia Martinez entered my dreams and immediately died there." The narrator of "Make Me," Chris Bergman, is a high school science teacher torn between his ex-girlfriend, Pearl, an English teacher in love with a student named Gabriel, and Lydia, an alluring girl also pining away for Gabriel, her ex-boyfriend. As the alleged adults are drawn into the teenagers' hormonal crisis, Chris desperately tries to avoid disaster. In brittle language, alternately painful and humorous, Rinehart continues to feel out the blurred territory between innocence and precocious sexuality. In "The Order of the Arrow," Bergman is a Boy Scout mesmerized by his tentmate, an outcast named Heitman, who sneaks out after curfew, proudly breaking the rules until the night he crashes the camp's great Indian initiation ceremony. Traditional symbols of manhood in this tale are transformed into emblems of modern ambiguity about male identity and authority. Returning in "LeSabre" to the theme of the adult child toddling precariously through life, Rinehart describes an insurance representative assuring a panicked customer that she can drive her car, addressing both her fears and his. "There's no such thing as life insurance," the representative admits. For Rinehart's heroes, failure is familiar, almost comfortable. His stark prose is marked by understated humor, moments of drama, slapstick, satiric sketches of daily routine and precise detailing of internal distress. In applying chaos theory to the emotional life of modern men, he reveals with striking clarity their lingering failures and small triumphs.
