Customer Reviews

Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Controlled Burn, $22.00 Amazon.com, is a debut collection of short fiction from New York author Scott Wolven. To give you a good feel for what he's got here, I can only offer an analogy. If Ernest Hemingway had written Winesburg, Ohio as a rough and tumble - instead of Sherwood Anderson, - and moved the place setting of those stories to both New England and the American West, the end result would resemble something akin to this collection.

Outside Work Detail is the tour de force of this bunch. In a prison tale on par with Stephen King's work, two St. Johnsbury, Vermont convicts (that have endured too much) dig graves for their fellow inmates in the prison cemetery during a snow storm, only to witness an act of nature that's almost cruelly indescribable. The three main characters - Ray Cooper, Russ Harper, and Reb Phillips - are spot on, and their spooky dealings are wryly observed. My favorite line? "That's one thing you don't get on the outside, to watch your own grave dug..."

Next to that, Tigers is a melancholy stunner. Ostensibly a tale of love gone wrong, the story concentrates on Ann Latham, her young son Jimmy, and her tree-cutting boyfriend, Mark Hoff. Parts of this tale of triangulation are saccharin sweet, but by the very end, Wolven tears your heart out and laughingly throws it on the floor. I really find Wolven's use of return and reverberation in this story to be irresistible, and I couldn't have done a better job if I'd written it myself! If you can't cry on the inside some, while you're reading this account, you're truly not human.

Taciturnity, the book opener, is a nine page account of foreboding. I love the language and the dialogue, as it is exactly perfect. In a nutshell, Ida Stone - in an act of reprisal - has three massive oak trees in her yard felled by family friends Robert and Bobby Maynard, because they provide shade for her neighbor's pool and also because her neighbor, Officer Caporuzzi, was guilty, at least in her mind, of having her grandson arrested.

Readers will be bowled over by Atomic Supernova, one of the chronicles set in the American West. Elko County Sheriff Art Jenkins is on the lookout for Bob Burke, after phony money traced back to Bob results in the wrongful arrest of George Atwell. George is the son of Art's former deputy sheriff, the now retired Jim Atwell. In the course of pursuing Burke, the Sheriff - determined to set things straight - then knowingly deputizes a known cop-killer (hiding out with his brother in a scrap metal yard) to track down the dirty counterfeiter and bring him to task. There's also something kind of creepy going on in this story, about the way Jenkins and five other men in the developing manhunt for Burke interact with a five-year-old kid outside a Rogerson, Idaho strip mall laundromat, if you ask me. I'll leave the rest up to you to discover. But Atomic Supernova is top-notch in my book!

Of the remaining stories in this cycle, El Rey is a marginally strong account with an accomplished ending, but if you really want to know where Wolven got the inspiration for this yarn, look up the article in USA Today about El Rey that this was based upon. This story (blended with facts from another USA Today article) is apparently a riff on those accounts. I understand why Wolven would want to cut and paste stuff like that, but isn't that really a bit of a cheat?

Look for the ten-pager Rooming House to alert you to the hidden undercurrent of alcoholism snaking around in suburbia. This brief narrative uses memory as a lens to look at incidents in the past of the protagonist - with a neighbor, with his father, with his grandfather, with two of his wives - and then becomes an anecdote of a young man who (in his middle-age) becomes a drunkard, just like those same people that his role models despised.

Long after you've read Controlled Burn, these morose tales of people that are down on their luck will really stick with you. I think you'll appreciate them. They seem born of a sad life, some sad personal experiences.

Even though I admire at least half the stories in this volume, I do have some criticisms for Scott to ponder. If your subject matter weren't so low brow, would it work at all? This is popular fiction to be sure, but can you tackle high art? Can you tackle loftier ideas, and shed this "negative spiral" downbeat approach? Can you write in a more chronological, linear style?

Despite my affection for half the book, other stories seem disjointed and lack purpose - they only serve as a mitigating bridge. I consider The High Iron to be the weakest contribution, and much of the dialogue of the strung-out Red Green in two stories, Ball Lightning Reported and Crank, is nonsensical and abysmal. People don't really talk like that! Not even Meth addicts... While Controlled Burn is overall very good, it's not perfect. Wolven needs to concentrate on getting the patter down right - in places his dialogue is stilted, somewhat raw. Lastly, this isn't a thriller per se, but it does delve into the psychology of prison, crimes, and men. If you're a fan of shows like C.S.I. or NCIS I'd place this hardback high upon my "must read" list.

I picked up on this writer via a college textbook excerpt, and intrigued, I sent off for the whole book. I find drug and alcohol addiction, and incarceration so hopeless and depressing that I thought I should know more about them, and Wolven's book has the flavor of authenticity about it. I learned that many of the men in this book are like men in our society: we've lost our way and haven't found a new place for ourselves in a society where women are more independent than they used to be. This book isn't the place to find a light at the end of the tunnel; it wasn't written for that, but it showed me the lives of men on the edge, desperate men who can't find a way to happiness but who need to be understood and listened to--and who may one day find that path to happiness in spite of everything.

I'm following Scott Wolven's work for several years now. One of the best writers of our time, Wolven has been under the radar way too long. His works can land on several different genre shelves; he's way more than just another crime writer.

These insightful thirteen tales takes a deep look at mostly men considered by society as undesirables (the most positive rank) or throw-away the key dangerous cretins and a few women support characters whose hearts petrified years ago. The anthology is broken into two sections: The Northeast Kingdom (the prison population impacts election districts so without further delay needs politically to remain high) and The Fugitive West (justice is a fictionalized eastern term). Though seemingly different in austerity, the two sections share in common life in prison although some of the jails are not state or privately outsourced facilities, but segregated from the norm by alcohol or drug abuse or personal violence. This isolation from positive family values lead to replacement anti-values from an opposite pole predator peer pack. Even the good guys become tainted by the overwhelming subtractive nature of this sub-populace that Scott Wolven stars in his short stories. Perhaps the three strikes your out crowd should spend time with some of Mr. Wolven's creations, antagonists who will show the outcome not the output of understanding what crime is worth incarceration. These thirteen stories are deep, thought provoking and exciting as Mr. Wolven touches a nerve with a strong series of lead losers who you want to avoid even though the reader can't forget them.

Harriet Klausner

Finally one of those cat stroking, pillow fluffing editors peeled their eyes away from their Queer Eye for the Straight Guy reruns to publish something original. I would've really given this book only three stars, because I didn't particularly like the narrative style. But it's the only decent book I've found that appeals primarily to the male demographic since `03 with Craig Clevenger's Contortionist's Handbook. Whoever came up with the idea to publish a work of fiction about crystal meth, bounty hunters, guns and dogs was completely crazy. But it's for that reason it deserves the five stars.

Many of these stories are strong and depict harder, tougher characters than the ones I'm used to reading. Wolven plumbs deeply into unseemly lives and desperate situations, never afraid of being a bit too dark or bleak. I appreciated his fearlessness. The strongest stories like "El Rey," "Outside Work Detail," "Controlled Burn" and "Atomic Supernova" offer the reader provocative characters, dangerous atmospheres, breathless tension, remarkable authenticity and more than a couple of surprises. That said, other stories in the collection begin to feel repetitive and superfluous; stories like "The High Iron," "The Rooming House" and both Red Green stories just rework the same themes and situations that Wolven explores with more success and wholeness in the stronger stories. By the end of the collection, I got the fact that Wolven can write about men on the wrong side of the law better than most writers. I just wanted to see what else he could do.

I enjoyed it very much. The stories were all similarly related to each other and very gripping. A great quick read.