Pre-Order COUNTRY HARDBALL here
Maybe every choice is a bullet. Doesn't matter which one you choose. All works out the same.
I am about to go bonkers for a book.
So run to your bomb shelters, lock yourselves up and pray the gods of rationality BECAUSE THEY HAVE FORSAKEN US!!! COUNTRY HARDBALL had me at ''hello'' and yet found ways to up the stakes and change the rules of the games as I progressed through its tortured, yet oddly familiar universe. Seriously, it's good. It's the kind of good that makes you want to redefine what you really mean when you say that something is ''good'', so you say it with an inflexion: ''COUNTRY HARDBALL is goooooooooooooooood''. Feel my drift? No? It's all right. That's what reviews are for, to break down this kind of statement. Well, that's just what I'm about to do...
COUNTRY HARDBALL is what you could call a novel-in-stories. Yet, you could debate whether this is a novel or a short story collection. I like the concept, it's cohesive yet eclectic. The main storyline is based on Roy Alison's return to his hometown after spending some hard time in the correctional system. Roy took the wheel while high when he was a teenager and ended up killing his parents, so he became somewhat locally infamous. But Roy isn't present in every story. Author Steve Weedle created an entire town filled with the broken hopes, the broken dreams and the broken lives of its inhabitants. It's a place that's alien, yet that will feel oddly familiar to you.
One thing I loved about Steve Weddle's writing is his capacity to let a moment soak in, to magnifiy the apparently meaningless enough to reveal its nature. Very few authors have that talent. From the top of my head Dennis Lehane and Raymond Carver did and that is exactly why they struck a chord with me. My two favorite stories featured a kind hearted teenager named Rusty (whom I imagined to be played by Ryan Gosling, for some reason) where you could almost feel the weight of every seconds on his shoulders. He was an interesting contrast to Roy, who was deliberately trying to slow his life down and get a grip on something stable. To tell you the truth, I could have taken an entire novel/collection filled with Rusty and Roy stories.
''I know who you are, shitface.'' He raised the barrels of the shotgun to my face. ''Everybody knows who you are. You're the piece of shit who killed his parents.''
That stopped me. I guess I'll never get used to that. Never get away from it. Which is fine. I did kill my parents.
I'm still not entirely sure why COUNTRY HARDBALL nailed me like an aluminium bat to the neck. Maybe it's because I'm from a small mining town that bears several similarities with the universe Steve Weddle has written. It's awesomely realistic.While it is (and should be) labeled as crime fiction, crime is never the narrative trigger. It's an end that characters often meet. Some of the stories contain no crime at all, but it's often a very seducing alternative when you're uneducated, unemployed and strapped for cash. COUNTRY HARDBALL can be heartbreaking in the way it portrays how crime reaches small communities. Sometimes it's a choice, but sometimes it isn't and Weddle's characters are pushed, like the characters of a Greek Tragedy, in a conflict that is bigger than them.
COUNTRY HARDBALL is a special book.You heard it here, before its release. It's going to please genre and literary fans both. It has the intimacy, the urgency, the understated language and the wicked syntax to please whatever reader is going to give it a chance. Read it, for it is a beautiful, haunting and tainted portrait of what America has become. COUNTRY HARDBALL is alive in a way most works of fiction aren't and will never be. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets in the mix for more than one year-end awards.