Ex-mill-worker's grim stories have the truth of an insider's view

By Matt Leingang Associated Press

CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — The book-signing lasted for hours, indicating that the locals hold no grudges against author Donald Ray Pollock for depicting life here as a grotesque blend of drug abusers, wife beaters and sex fiends.

Pollock, a former paper-mill worker, drew on social problems that haunted friends and relatives for his first book, Knockemstiff, a collection of dark stories set in rural southern Ohio. It's fiction, but the book is ­getting national acclaim.

His characters are damaged souls. A mother asks her son to creep into her bedroom with scissors and act out a serial-killer fantasy. A drunken father orders his 7-year-old son to clobber another boy in the restroom of a drive-in movie theater.

The book's title is a nod to Pollock's hometown, Knockemstiff, a hamlet about 10 miles from Chillicothe that had gravel roads, rundown housing, a few general stores and a rough-and-tumble reputation when Pollock was growing up. The roads are paved now, and there are new houses on 40-acre lots that used to be farmland, but it's still a crossroads.

”It's not nearly as wild as the stories in the book,“ says Pollock, 53. ”I took that hard-core reputation and sort of cranked it up a couple notches.“

The result is a bleak, sometimes violent look at people on the fringes of Appalachian society who aren't typical fodder for publishing giants. Doubleday released the book in March, printing 27,000 copies, about five times the average for short-story collections, said Gerald Howard, who edited the book.

Sales were at 3,000 in mid-April, according to Nielsen BookScan.

Publishers Weekly and The New York Times compared his book to Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson's 1919 masterpiece on small-town life. Amazon.com listed it among top new releases.

Pollock, a high school dropout who battled his own drug and alcohol addictions, doesn't mean to portray his hometown as a gothic freak show.

”I probably pushed the envelope as far as you can go without stereotyping or going too far to the point where you're just making fun of these people,“ he said.

The book's characters are trapped in life or situations that they don't want to be in, he says. Some are looking for a way out, but others are beyond redemption.

Pollock got sober in 1986 after a fourth trip to rehab, then he took night classes at Ohio University, earning an English degree in 1994.

”All my life, I thought writing would be a nice life but never had the discipline or determination to try,“ says Pollock, an avid reader who drove a dump truck at the paper mill. ”When I was 45, I realized if I didn't give it a shot, it would be too late.“

He began typing out stories by Ernest Hemingway and others, studying their use of language and sentence structure. He also took a correspondence course in fiction writing at Ohio U.

Small literary journals published some of his early stories. In 2005, with his wife's support, Pollock quit the mill after 32 years to seek a master's degree in creative writing at Ohio State University.

”It's apparent to me how much he wants to be a writer,“ said Valerie Vogrin, an editor at Sou'wester, a literary journal at Southern Illinois University that published some of his early work. ”There's no carelessness in his writing. Every word is there for a reason.“

Ohio State gave Pollock a one-year fellowship in January, which he is using to finish a novel about a serial killer in Knockemstiff whose crime spree is intertwined with the story of a teenager yearning to escape life in the hills.

Doubleday has an exclusive first option to publish the novel.