Customer Reviews

Spit Baths (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction)

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Following the weird but vaguely sensible logic of a dream, a teacher finds his school's field trip buses redirected to his father's house, where he grew up.

Once there, the father presents the son's life in a dry slide show. The son rushes from room to room, encountering memories and blocked escapes. A mother and a former lover that he pleads with to hide so that no one should see them. That his lives, past and present, should remain segregated.

And throughout, despite his attempts to put clothes on, the son finds himself naked.

Field Trip, a story from Greg Downs' collection Spit Baths, paints the haunting hopelessness of the great Southern exodus -- the withered roots that never quite break from a region that's all but died. And the guilt that always hangs with the accumulating weight of generations. Each story aches with the same pains.

They flow into each other, each one an expansion on the same themes. The blending of stories is subtle, rich, and connected by the universal string of the past. The prose throughout has a Southern informality to it, making an accessible and enjoyable read which still manages to glimmer with fluid and evocative observation. Cans twang in impacts against the ground, a girl's skin coats her lover's tongue with dried sweat. It all has the familiar, dry, dead beauty of a preserved antebellum house, with furnished rooms all coated in dust.

Spit Baths is a subtle but stunning achievement. A must-read for all Southerners, both resident and expatriate - Greg Downs has given us as grand a eulogy as any for our lost homeland, but tucked it quietly into the obituary page of a small town newspaper.

I thoroughly enjoyed these stories. Downs characters have a very unique view of the world they inhabit. Their pasts weigh heavy on them as they struggle or push themselves to move forward in an ever changing world. Their take on events and often peculiar advice is refreshing, if somewhat bizarre. It's a good read.

I am generally not into this genre of fiction, but, a reading group that I follow picked the book up and I decided I would try it out. I'm glad I did. Greg has an uncanny ability to get deep into his characters with what seems like minimal effort and smooth transition.
I'm looking forward to his future work.