The Outlaw Album

The eight previous novels by Woodrell (e.g., Winter's Bone) are mostly set in the Missouri Ozarks, where his family has lived for generations. In his first story collection, Woodrell writes with the same blunt style about painful family dramas and the familiar dark fringes of society. His characters are a dirt-poor, lawless bunch. In "The Echo of Neighborly Bones," the troubled Boshell shoots his neighbor just for being an opinionated foreigner from Minnesota but mostly for killing Boshell's dog and for being one of the newcomers responsible for the family losing its land. In "Uncle," a young girl pushed to the limit by her mother's evil brother whacks him a good one with a mattock handle, but he doesn't die. In the moving "Two Things," Cecil writes poetry from prison, which could line him up for early parole, but his family won't take him back because of the terrible things he did to them.