Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: down through the valley, Jeff Park, Jim Lemons, Stewart Quick (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The stories in this outstanding debut collection explore the troubled relationships of men down on their luck, in failed marriages, estranged from family, caught in imbroglios between sons and their fathers and stepfathers, and even, in Wild America, the subtle and ferocious competition between teenage girls. Bob Monroe, the protagonist of The Brown Coast, loses his job, his inheritance and his wife after the death of his father. The narrator of Down Through the Valley, meanwhile, is persuaded to drive his ex-wife's boyfriend home from an ashram after he injures himself. In Leopard, the threat of a missing pet leopard lurking in the woods hints at a troubled 11-year-old's rage toward his stepfather. The narrator of Down Through the Valley has a savage freak-out that terrifies him. The strange and magnificent title story, in which Vikings set off again toward an oft-raided island, beautifully ties the collection together in its heartbreaking final paragraph. Tower's uncommon mastery of tone and wide-ranging sympathy creates a fine tension between wry humor and the primal rage that seethes just below the surface of each of his characters. (Mar.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Critics described this collection as visceral, contemplative, and inappropriately side-splitting, and were captivated by tales of men and their roles as fathers, stepfathers, brothers, sons, husbands, and ex-husbands (only one story featured a female protagonist). Reviewers further marveled at Tower’s ability to take readers from gut-clutching hilarity to gloomy introspection and back again in compact, descriptive language. Although critics disagreed about which stories were the best, only the Boston Globe cited “weaker,” “choppy,” and “overlong” entries. Overall, Tower has created a stunning collection of stories that will linger in the hearts and minds of readers.
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (March 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374292191
• ISBN-13: 978-0374292195
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #25,548 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars marvelous and original language and situations, March 20, 2009

By	michael carroll "michael carroll" (new york, new york United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I started to read this book skeptically, but from the first story found myself completely disarmed. My favorite stories are "Retreat" and "Wild America," both gorgeously unexpected treatments of their subjects (in the first, sibling relationships, and in the second adolescent girls and sexual discovery). Nothing I could say about the way Wells Tower goes into his stories could possibly prepare you for the surprising pleasures of his language. He's always funny without sneering or being self-satisfied in his conclusions regarding this big messy thing, "American culture." He's sly and humble. But his sentences--the core of any literary enterprise as far as I'm concerned--are at the crux of his art. Carefully wrought, they approximate the uniqueness and the varieties of personal experience. And did I mention how funny he is? Anyone who cares about word choice or a fresh eye trained on the observations he makes (in the tradition of Joy Williams or Richard Yates, say) will read them aloud more than once and chuckle. Beautiful.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Decorations in an Empty Room, June 16, 2009

By	Eyuse Torrents "Divx user" (Minneapolis) - See all my reviews

I agree with another review here: The Times really piled it on, and made me expect the second coming of Cheever and Chekov combined. The stories were solid and unique but far from outstanding. I found them long on punchy word choices but short on depth. For example, bugs stuck to a truck's grill are "stuccoed" there; rather than waving an object in somebody's face, a character "wands" it, which isn't a verb and doesn't really make sense except by association, calling to mind the waving of a wand. The stories are long on these snappy stylistics, and short on emotional depth and glaringly lacking in demonstrating any real understanding of human emotional complexity. I'm not levelling that at Tower himself, but at the narratives. Everything about the characters is shown, or attempted to be shown, through action, props, events, and dialogue. This is not a technical fault, because plenty can be accomplished that way, but there is little richness between the lines. What do his bumbling, dysfunctional Floridian carnies feel? We don't know. The narrator doesn't know. Does Tower know?

The first story is the strongest. "On the Show" really baffled and even embarassed this reader, calling to mind the hallmarks of amatuer fiction so often encountered in workshops: episodes, events, and people connected by physical promixity but otherwise disunited by any thematic thread. It's the writers job to do a little bit of weaving, and that has been forsaken or skipped here. "On the Show" has an ending in which the material just stops, seemingly because the author ran out of stuff to have happen. The last sentence is a nutty image, like the dozens and dozens of images provided along the way, and the last one has no special resonsance for being the last. It reads like that Beck song on "The Information" where the drums just stop and the guitar strums a few more chords, and then you hear Beck at the soundboard answering a call from someone in the house: "What? Dinner? Oh, okay." Silence. Tower did his thing along the way, showing people sexually abusing a child, smoking herion out of tinfoil, being large like a giant, having a disagreement with a step-father. Hope you liked it, because that's what it was.

A lack of compassion for his characters and narrative ungenerousness from an author I find distasteful, especially when there is evidence of effort and intention in the quirky words choices. But in a barren emotional context, these verbal oddities come to seem like decorations in an empty room.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A bit over-rated, April 25, 2009

By	Martin J. Kelly, Jr. (Bronx, NY, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

These stories are extremely good, but the reviews in the NY Times are too laudatory. The writing is spectacular in many places, pop-culture generated grammatical slips aside in a few spots, and the voice is strong.

I found a low level of emotional depth in most of the stories and I was surprised by the experience given the writing.