Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men

by Scott Wolven

Book Overview

Once or twice a decade, an unknown short-story writer blazes onto the literary scene with work that is thrilling and new. Scott Wolven is such a talent, and his raw, blistering tales of hard-bitten... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743260112
• ISBN13: 9780743260114
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A superb collection...

Outstanding collection of short stories! I bought this book after reading only a few reviews and it paid off. "Controlled Burn" is one of the best short story collections I've read in awhile. The book has thirteen stories, all worth reading! After reading the first two stories, I felt the writing was great, but the stories were slow and very humble. Once you hit the third story "El Rey", the book never looks back and every story gets better and better. Meth dealers, boxers, fugitives, alcoholics, fathers, sons, gangs, bounty hunters, dogs - their all here in "Controlled Burn". A few that really blew me away - Crank Ball Lightning Reported Atomic Supernova The Copper Kings Vigilance A great collection, if you enjoy short stories, this book is a must read! If you read "Controlled Burn" and enjoyed it, also check out "Poachers" by Tom Franklin & "The Hotel Eden" by Ron Carlson, both amazing books of short stories.

Brilliant Debut

Wolven's outstanding debut collection of thirteen short stories are arranged in two geographic sections, "The Northeast Kingdom" of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, and "The Fugitive West" of Idaho, Montana, and western Washington. But regardless of the location, the characters are cut of the same cloth. This is a book populated by tree cutters, truck drivers, cons, ex-cons, brawlers, alcoholics, crystal meth heads, white supremacists, scrap metal workers, and bikers -- a host of tough men who are born to lose. Many of the characters weave in and out of the various stories and to a certain extent, the stories cover a lot of the same themes in a lot of the same ways. Yet Wolven's voice is so strong and his writing so matter-of-factly taut that each is gripping and the overall effect is devastating. The book's opener, "Taciturnity", sets the tone for all that follows: a tough old woman orders local tree men to cut down the three ancient oaks on her property that provide shade for her new neighbor, a policeman who didn't cut her grandson any slack. Here are encapsulated a number of the books' recurring motifs: terse blue collar workers, tough old-timers, ambivalence and suspicion toward the law, and a definite sense of making one's own justice. "Outside Work Detail" is set in a minimum security prison, where men detailed to dig graves in the frozen ground watch as a deer impales itself on an electrified fence and bleeds to death. The symbolism is perhaps a little too in-your-face, but it works. "El Rey" is a brutal story revolving around an impromptu boxing match at a logging camp between the local hard case a Latino fighter up from New York. "Crank" is about a couple guys putting together a meth lab in the woods and all the bad stuff that leads to. "Ball Lightning Reported" is about a guy working in a medical waste facility who boosts biohazard trash in order to sell leftover drugs -- again, bad things happen. "Tigers" is the probably most powerful story in the book -- its protagonist is a hardworking freelance tree-cutter who's struggling to put something good together with a single mom. Just when it seems like Wolven's given us a character for whom things might actually work out, he shows just how brittle relationships in the Northeast Kingdom can get. "The Rooming House" acts as a transition from East to West, as the alcoholic protagonist recounts a cautionary tale from his upstate New York childhood and then offhandedly explains "I ended up in Seattle several years later, really just a series of rides in police cars that took me further and further across the country...." The other outstanding story in the collection is "Atomic Supernova", a gothic tale of modern-day frontier justice involving a cop-killer in hiding and the Sheriff who may or may not turn him in -- it's rife with tension and surprises. "The Copper Kings" picks up the narrator from "The Rooming House" as he becomes a bounty-hunter's assistant and becomes entangled in a sear

The Chick Lit Antithesis

Finally one of those cat stroking, pillow fluffing editors peeled their eyes away from their Queer Eye for the Straight Guy reruns to publish something original. I would've really given this book only three stars, because I didn't particularly like the narrative style. But it's the only decent book I've found that appeals primarily to the male demographic since `03 with Craig Clevenger's Contortionist's Handbook. Whoever came up with the idea to publish a work of fiction about crystal meth, bounty hunters, guns and dogs was completely crazy. But it's for that reason it deserves the five stars.

Master Short Storytelling

Brilliant. These are the most raw, brutal, lyrical and hard stories I've read in an age. I meant to read a story a night and ended up consuming the entire book at once. There is a part of every human being capable of creating only grief and ruin, leaving chaos in their wake. Wolven writes of these people. The stories are intertwined over years, location or happenstance who's protagonists cross over into oblivion of their own making. It is an oblivion we've all at least set a toe into, scuttling away, scared by what we saw and felt. The men in these stories embraced it, breathing it into every cell. Wolven's work has appeared in the Mississippi Review and three (2002, 2003, 2004) Best American Mysteries collections. He is a must read for any connoisseur of the short story.

deep, thought provoking and exciting collection

These insightful thirteen tales takes a deep look at mostly men considered by society as undesirables (the most positive rank) or throw-away the key dangerous cretins and a few women support characters whose hearts petrified years ago. The anthology is broken into two sections: The Northeast Kingdom (the prison population impacts election districts so without further delay needs politically to remain high) and The Fugitive West (justice is a fictionalized eastern term). Though seemingly different in austerity, the two sections share in common life in prison although some of the jails are not state or privately outsourced facilities, but segregated from the norm by alcohol or drug abuse or personal violence. This isolation from positive family values lead to replacement anti-values from an opposite pole predator peer pack. Even the good guys become tainted by the overwhelming subtractive nature of this sub-populace that Scott Wolven stars in his short stories. Perhaps the three strikes your out crowd should spend time with some of Mr. Wolven's creations, antagonists who will show the outcome not the output of understanding what crime is worth incarceration. These thirteen stories are deep, thought provoking and exciting as Mr. Wolven touches a nerve with a strong series of lead losers who you want to avoid even though the reader can't forget them. Harriet Klausner