Customer Reviews

The Blessings of Hard-Used Angels

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A wonderful debut short story collection from Alabama writer John Cottle. If you love language, you'll love these stories. There are descriptions in The Blessings of Hard-Used Angels that are as lush as the landscape that inspired them. A rich cast of characters, too, their lives tragic, humorous, hopeful and ill-starred. The law is a central theme, what it takes to uphold it, break it, get used by it or simply ignored by it. There is a long tradition of great writing from the South, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor come immediately to mind. John Cottle's writing is of this tradition and continues it. Do yourself a favour and check this book out. You won't be disappointed.

John Cottle is a master storyteller. One tends to forget, in the midst of all the pseudo-fiction of today that is passed off as literature, that classic, poignant, 'real' literature is still being written. Cottle is one of those Southern writers who has stepped out of the traditions of Tennessee Williams' and William Faulkner to give us touching and masterful art in The Blessings of Hard-Used Angels. But for all of that, he is still lending his own fresh views to the plight of those men and women, the hard living, the hard working, the people we all know, mesmerizing us with prose that is so well wrought that it sweeps the reader right in. One story after another is guaranteed to knock your socks off, so I highly recommend this book. If you only buy one title this Christmas for gifts, make it this one; you can't go wrong.

The Blessings of Hard-Used Angels is an enjoyable and rewarding collection of short fiction. John Cottle's stories are fresh with unique, sometimes off-beat, but always-believable characters. I have no qualms in comparing his approach to development with that of more well known Southern writers in an extremely favorable manner. I would then erase the Southern writer categorization, not wanting to represent the collection as anything other than great stories and excellent writing. Annie McGill, my selection for one of the better stories in any collection, is subtle but unrelenting as it delves into and renders an attorney's emotional response to a quandry. Simple enough, short, but accomplished in such a manner as to create a picture far more intricate than its length might indicate.

John Cottle's writing is like a clear mountain pool--the kind you might be lucky enough to find wandering the deep forested ends of the South. It has that kind of arresting clarity and simplicity and yet such richness of detail--light striking the surface just so, wheeling cascade of ferns, the dark reaches of shadows, rocks stacked in centuries--that tells you from the first you're looking at something you'll remember a long, long time. Of course you will reach your hand to touch such beauty, and the cold shock of that clear water will go straight through your bones--it's that powerful. You'll laugh but you won't leave: in fact, you may even jump right in, boots and all, splashing and swirling, floating for hours, remembering how wonderful it is to be warm-blooded, to be human, to be alive.....If you love masterful writing, memorable characters, and language that tells the truth of living, buy this book now.