In his first short story collection, Donald Hays once again picks up the mantle of master storyteller that marked his entrance into the world of southern letters with two previous novels, The Hangman’s Children and The Dixie Association.

Many of these stories deal with wasted lives, lives lived in quiet desperation because the alternatives, the true lives, are just out of reach either because of bad luck or bad choice. The book opens with “The Rites of Love”, a bittersweet love story about a mother who’s just lost her son, and seeks solace in her old boyfriend who’s been paralyzed ever since a high school football game. Hays deftly handles situations that could’ve been death to a less skilled writer, taking what could’ve been a melodrama and making it real, at times funny, at times hard, which is life in a nutshell.

“Salvage,” tells the story of Tom Angler whose wife is on her deathbed. “His has been a coward’s life,” Angler says of himself. When his daughter comes to help out, Angler reacts strongly. “He wants to tell her that all of them, him included, him especially, have wasted their goddamn little chickenshit lives.” With nothing to do but wait for his wife to die, Angler revisits the love of his life, a woman he dated over half a century ago. Both of them have married and lived their lives, but Angler just can’t let go of this holdout memory.

Many of the characters in these stories are outlaws in spirit, wanting to breakout of their conventional lives, the safe lives they’ve made for themselves.

Hays’ style is tight, controlled. These stories move perfectly from tragedy to humor. They are subtle portraits of lives grown wild and far away from where they’d hoped to be. These aren’t caricatures, though. There is warmth in these stories. Hays isn’t looking down his nose or deriding his characters. He is treating them like the tarnished souls they are, prone to stupidity and self-destructive, but also capable of redemption because Hays is laughing with them and not at them.

But this is all beside the point, which is that these are fine stories, some of the best I’ve read in a long time. Several of them have appeared in Best New Stories From the South, Pushcart and Stories From the Blue Moon Café anthologies. Hays’ second and most recent novel was published over a decade ago, but it is clear by the power and skill of these stories that he has not been absent. A good story takes time, and these have been worth waiting for. My only hope is that he doesn’t make us wait another ten years for his next book.

-CL Bledsoe