Controlled BurnStories of Prison, Crime, and MenScott...

Controlled Burn

Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men

Scott Wolven

Scribner: 214 pp., $22

The once, and possibly future, jailbirds who populate Scott Wolven’s rough-and-tumble stories could have walked straight out of a Merle Haggard record. They’re lonesome fugitives, and the highway -- or, at least, a lonely back road in Nevada or deepest Vermont -- is their home. Wolven’s work has appeared in “The Best American Mystery Stories,” but this bracing debut collection -- full of loggers, scrap-metal dealers and pharmaceuticals -- calls to mind Thom Jones and Denis Johnson more than, say, Tony Hillerman. The moody, violent and frequently addled episodes that unfold throughout “Controlled Burn,” many of them interlocking, are gritty portraits of American male desperation, shot through with comic hard luck and brought to a chemically enhanced edge.

The book is divided into “The Northeast Kingdom” and “The Fugitive West,” giving us an atlas of the modern outlaw. In “Taciturnity,” a cantankerous Yankee grandmother sacrifices her majestic oaks to spite her neighbor, the Vermont narc who put away her grandson, Ray. (Ray turns up in many of these stories, in one guise or another.) “Outside Work Detail” finds Ray in the St. Johnsbury pen, winding down his term and given the rare privilege of fresh air, which turns out to be a grave-digging job. “Crank” and “Ball Lightning Reported” introduce Red Green, a crystal-meth-fueled philosophe with a gift for bons mots: “[E]very day is a naked scissor fight.” “Your understanding is a puddle so shallow I can’t bear it.”

Out West, Ray transforms into a law dodger who veers between metal yards, copper mines and biker haunts. In “Atomic Supernova,” he’s tapped to become the local deputy, proof that the West is still wild. “Vigilance,” meanwhile, finds him giving the straight life a go before being sucked -- inevitably -- into the book’s most outlandish, and potentially deadly, caper.

Wolven’s men have a weakness for schemes, they slip away when nobody’s looking and they often keep a piece under the driver’s seat. These grisly fables remind us that freedom, for ex-cons, is never easy: “The whole sky seemed covered with heavy-gauge mesh steel, one big prison.”

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O My Darling

A Novel

Amity Gaige

Other Press: 248 pp., $22

In Amity Gaige’s utterly devourable first novel, Clark and Charlotte Adair move into a cute yellow house at 12 Quail Hollow Road in the town of Clementine. The dream of “happy photos on the fridge, the ants running along behind the caulked seam of the backsplash, the inevitable blackened banana in the fruit bowl” is tantalizingly within reach. But it quickly goes awry, along with the envisioned heights of marital bliss that allegedly come along with a first-time home buy.

This is the stuff the real estate agents never tell you about: the ghosts -- of previous owners? -- that hover in doorways and carry on clenched arguments; the feeling of “not quite being” that takes hold of Clark; and the queasy insecurity that smothers Charlotte, “a loner, a skeptic, an orphan -- slumming in the realms of family happiness.”

The willowy Charlotte, given to wisecracks and daydreams, is an actual adoptee. But as “O My Darling” gently, and beautifully, unfolds, like a gauzy curtain in an open window, we discover that Clark is the true orphan. His batty mother, Vera -- who raised Clark on tall tales of his parents once living in a chicken coop -- has recently died. His father, meanwhile, remains AWOL with his mistress.

Enduring his days as a guidance counselor at Clementine Junior High (“that gym-socky school”), Clark befriends a brother-and-sister duo -- the paternal instinct kicks in -- who end up emptying 12 Quail Hollow of its valuables. The ensuing meltdown leads Clark on a reckless yuletide road trip that finds him musing on the bittersweet facts of life: “Time favored unhappiness. It slowed you through the awful parts and whisked you through the good ones.”

“O My Darling” is a wistful diorama of domestic life: the impossibility of fresh starts, the hazards of full disclosure, the perils of dog ownership. It suggests that homes are stage sets, where the ghosts reciting their lines in the next room might be ourselves, that our deepest fears have all been lived before.