The Thousands

“Once Boshell finally killed his neighbour he couldn’t seem to quit killing him.” The opening thirteen words set the tone for this collection of stories featuring tragically troubled characters – meth dealers, rapists, criminals and war veterans.

There’s Boswell, who killed his neighbour (multiple times!), the 17-year-old girl kidnapped while mowing a lawn, the jockey beaten with a piece of wood, oh, and and the guy who burned his neighbour’s house down because it blocked his bed-ridden father’s river view. This is a Di Morrissey nightmare!

Woodrell, best known as the author of the Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone, returns to the Ozarks where his desperate characters fight crushing poverty and violence. From the past (one story refers to a racial murder in the 1930s, another to the murder of a Dutch drifter riding with Quantril’s Raiders during the Civil War) to the present, the characters have one thing in common: stone cold desperation.

Comparisons to Cormac McCarthy are hard to avoid as Woodrell’s prose is lean, mean and about as blunt as the two-by-four that crushes the jockey’s head in. At 160 pages The Outlaw Album could be read in 24 hours. I did – but that’s a lot of violence for one day!