Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men [Hardcover]

Scott Wolven (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 5, 2005

Once or twice a decade, an unknown short-story writer blazes onto the literary scene with work that is thrilling and new. Scott Wolven is such a talent, and his raw, blistering tales of hard-bitten convicts, dodgy informers, and men running from the law make for "the most exciting, authentic collection of short stories I have read in years," says George Pelecanos.

Brooding, edgy, and sometimes violent, Controlled Burn's loosely linked stories are each in some way a distillation of hard time -- spent either in prison, the backwoods of Vermont, or the badlands of the American West. Peopled by boxers, drunks, truck drivers, murderers, bounty hunters, drifters traveling under assumed names, and men whose luck ran out a thousand miles ago, these stories feel hard-won from life, and if they are moody and stark, so too are they filled with human longing.

Controlled Burn is divided into two sections: "The Northeast Kingdom" and "The Fugitive West." In each, Scott Wolven reveals a broken world where there is no bottom left to hit. In the haunting "Outside Work Detail," convicts stoically dig graves for their fellow prisoners yet reserve their deepest grief for the senseless death of a deer. "Crank" introduces Red Green, a maniacally brilliant addict who brews his own crystal meth in a backwoods lab, and whose high-energy antics inspire both cautious admiration and mortal fear in his business associates. In "Ball Lightning Reported," Red Green's ultimate fate is revealed. In "Atomic Supernova," a revenge-obsessed sheriff deputizes a known cop-killer to help him hunt down a counterfeiter and drug lord. The unexpectedly tender and heartbreaking "The Copper Kings" concerns a father facing the dark truth behind his son's disappearance. And in "Vigilance," a hunted man struggles to escape his past, always yearning for an honorable yet perhaps unreachable future.

Powered by a spare, ruminative prose style that recalls the best of Denis Johnson and Thom Jones, Controlled Burn is an unforgettable debut.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. To say that these beautifully written, deceptively simple stories are loosely connected is to miss a large part of the point. The collection, divided into two geographical sections ("The Northeast Kingdom" and "The Fugitive West"), begins with a man trapped into becoming a drug informant; it ends with another man getting the same treatment from the authorities. All the stories, including three that have been published in recent Best American Mystery Stories anthologies, share certain themes: life in prison; a fascination with guns and violence, even among men who aren't career criminals; the despair of working-class life, especially in jobs on the fringes of economically depressed areas. A man on a prison farm buries the bodies of dead convicts while a deer caught on an electric fence burns in the background. A gang of Hispanic fighters descends from Canada to challenge workers at a logging camp in bloody battles. Wolven's prose is as cold and sharp as an ice crystal: "If I'm not here day after tomorrow," a sheriff tells the narrator of "Atomic Supernova," "you go ahead and kill Bob Burke and we'll figure it all out later." Wolven's not as romantic or sympathetic as Hemingway, but it's hard to think that Papa wouldn't appreciate his artistry and imagination.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"Wolven has turned raw, unreconciled life into startling, evocative, and very good short stories. He draws on a New England different from Updike's and even Dubus', but his fictive lives -- no less than theirs -- render the world newly, and full of important consequence."

-- Richard Ford

"Scott Wolven's stories are torn road maps leading into an adrenalin-fueled land of the lost. Ever since I first read 'The Copper Kings,' an early story, I've been addicted to his fierce insights and fascinated by the way a strange sweetness underpins the violent macho trappings of his beyond-the-law, hard-case men on the run."

-- Michele Slung, editor of Stranger and I Shudder at Your Touch

"Controlled Burn is good. Very good. Remarkable, actually. Tough, gritty, and honest--reminiscent of Hemingway with a little bit of John Steinbeck. Scott Wolven writes about an America that few of us have ever seen--and he writes about it from first-hand experience."

-- Nelson DeMille

"It has been at least a few years since a story collection gripped me from first to last. The drought has ended, and now I will read this book again. The wisdom, love, and depravity of convicts, boxers, cranksters, loggers, and drunks fill the stove of this fine book so that long after you finish the last story, Scott Wolven's savage and lovely characters and crystalline prose will burn through your heart."

-- Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead

"Scott Wolven's tales are tough, unsentimental, and completely earned. This is the most exciting, authentic collection of short stories I have read in years."

--George Pelecanos

"Dazzling and disturbing...white-hot prose...extraordinary. A debut to treasure, a remarkably assured cycle of stories."

--Kirkus Reviews

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; 1St Edition edition (April 5, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743260112
• ISBN-13: 978-0743260114
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #236,820 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Debut, November 19, 2005

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men (Hardcover)

Wolven's outstanding debut collection of thirteen short stories are arranged in two geographic sections, "The Northeast Kingdom" of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and "The Fugitive West" of Idaho, Montana, and western Washington. But regardless of the location, the characters are cut of the same cloth. This is a book populated by tree cutters, truck drivers, cons, ex-cons, brawlers, alcoholics, crystal meth heads, white supremacists, scrap metal workers, and bikers -- a host of tough men who are born to lose. Many of the characters weave in and out of the various stories and to a certain extent, the stories cover a lot of the same themes in a lot of the same ways. Yet Wolven's voice is so strong and his writing so matter-of-factly taut that each is gripping and the overall effect is devastating.

The book's opener, "Taciturnity", sets the tone for all that follows: a tough old woman orders local tree men to cut down the three ancient oaks on her property that provide shade for her new neighbor, a policeman who didn't cut her grandson any slack. Here are encapsulated a number of the books' recurring motifs: terse blue collar workers, tough old-timers, ambivalence and suspicion toward the law, and a definite sense of making one's own justice. "Outside Work Detail" is set in a minimum security prison, where men detailed to dig graves in the frozen ground watch as a deer impales itself on an electrified fence and bleeds to death. The symbolism is perhaps a little too in-your-face, but it works. "El Rey" is a brutal story revolving around an impromptu boxing match at a logging camp between the local hard case a Latino fighter up from New York. "Crank" is about a couple guys putting together a meth lab in the woods and all the bad stuff that leads to. "Ball Lightning Reported" is about a guy working in a medical waste facility who boosts biohazard trash in order to sell leftover drugs -- again, bad things happen. "Tigers" is the probably most powerful story in the book -- its protagonist is a hardworking freelance tree-cutter who's struggling to put something good together with a single mom. Just when it seems like Wolven's given us a character for whom things might actually work out, he shows just how brittle relationships in the Northeast Kingdom can get.

"The Rooming House" acts as a transition from East to West, as the alcoholic protagonist recounts a cautionary tale from his upstate New York childhood and then offhandedly explains "I ended up in Seattle several years later, really just a series of rides in police cars that took me further and further across the country...." The other outstanding story in the collection is "Atomic Supernova", a gothic tale of modern-day frontier justice involving a cop-killer in hiding and the Sheriff who may or may not turn him in -- it's rife with tension and surprises. "The Copper Kings" picks up the narrator from "The Rooming House" as he becomes a bounty-hunter's assistant and becomes entangled in a search that leads to a dangerous biker compound out in the boonies. His story continues briefly in "Underdogs", a story Wolven says was inspired by Mexican writer Mariano Azuela's book The Underdogs. From its first line ("This is what happened, the same story I told the investigators.") "Vigilance" is a contemporary noir, complete with protagonist trying to lead a quiet life, and a sexy siren who drags him into all kinds of trouble.

The stories definitely all occupy the same interior landscape, and are consistent in atmosphere and tone, with characters cut of the same cloth. In that regard, you can read one story and know whether or not you're going to like the rest. In fact, six of them can be easily found and read online and three of them also appeared in various editions of the "Best American Mysteries" anthologies. Taken together, the stories reveal an assured storyteller with a strong voice, and I can't wait to see what he does next.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Master Short Storytelling, April 19, 2005

By 

Jennifer "Editor, EXPLETIVE DELETED" (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men (Hardcover)

Brilliant.

These are the most raw, brutal, lyrical and hard stories I've read in an age.

I meant to read a story a night and ended up consuming the entire book at once. There is a part of every human being capable of creating only grief and ruin, leaving chaos in their wake. Wolven writes of these people.

The stories are intertwined over years, location or happenstance who's protagonists cross over into oblivion of their own making. It is an oblivion we've all at least set a toe into, scuttling away, scared by what we saw and felt. The men in these stories embraced it, breathing it into every cell.

Wolven's work has appeared in the Mississippi Review and three (2002, 2003, 2004) Best American Mysteries collections. He is a must read for any connoisseur of the short story.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb collection..., June 1, 2009

By 

BJ "Brett Starr" (East Peoria, IL United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men (Hardcover)

Outstanding collection of short stories!

I bought this book after reading only a few reviews and it paid off. "Controlled Burn" is one of the best short story collections I've read in awhile.

The book has thirteen stories, all worth reading!

After reading the first two stories, I felt the writing was great, but the stories were slow and very humble. Once you hit the third story "El Rey", the book never looks back and every story gets better and better.

Meth dealers, boxers, fugitives, alcoholics, fathers, sons, gangs, bounty hunters, dogs - their all here in "Controlled Burn".

A few that really blew me away -

Crank
Ball Lightning Reported
Atomic Supernova
The Copper Kings
Vigilance

A great collection, if you enjoy short stories, this book is a must read!

If you read "Controlled Burn" and enjoyed it, also check out "Poachers" by Tom Franklin & "The Hotel Eden" by Ron Carlson, both amazing books of short stories.