FICTION

THE WRECKING YARD AND OTHER STORIES by Pinckney Benedict (Doubleday: $19; 224 pp.) Read Pinckney Benedict’s spare, often cruel tales of lost characters wandering a rural Hell, and a picture of the author comes to mind: Some weary, middle-aged man who’s seen too much, smokes too much, drinks too much, and whose heart is edged in cold steel. Wrong. Benedict attended Princeton and participated in the renowned University of Iowa creative-writing program, and unless he waited 30 years to publish his first book, he is probably under 30. There are terrors inside his head, though, that run through his characters, people for whom physical violence is the only outlet for twisted, ill-expressed emotions. In “Getting Over Arnette,” a boy tackles a mad Vietnam vet for suggesting that he might have slept with the boy’s departed lover, even though the young man recognizes that the vet is only taunting him, and will undoubtedly win any fight. In “The Electric Girl,” a jealous man is driven to murder, only to receive the unlikeliest punishment since Darryl Hannah cartwheeled toward her victim in the movie “Blade Runner.” The centerpiece of the collection is “Washman,” a torturous look at a man who is guilty of a rape no one would have discovered had a posse not pursued him for a murder that was, in fact, self-defense. The reader both pities and abhors Washman; the tension of those emotions is what gives Benedict’s stories their power.