Jerry Gabriel delivers an unsentimental portrait of rural America in Drowned Boy, a collection of linked stories that reveals a world of brutality, beauty, and danger in the forgotten landscape of small-town basketball tournaments and family reunions. In "Boys Industrial School," two brothers track an escaped juvenile convict, while in the titular novella; a young man and woman embark on a haphazard journey to find meaning in the death of a high-school classmate. These stories probe the fraught cusp of adulthood, the frustrations of escape and difference, and the emotional territory of disappointment-set in the hardscrabble borderlands where Appalachia meets the Midwest.
"Eight linked stories, set among boys and men in southern Ohio, have the masculine virtues of honest craft and plain, carefully chosen language . . . Writing that sticks with the reader much longer than showier fiction."
The Plain Dealer
"A nuanced and complicated examination of the way grief is contagious, sparking dark emotions in people who initially are barely affected."
Time Out Chicago
"In prose as spare and enchanting as the town's landscape, Gabriel paints a beautiful and sobering portrait of Middle Americans trapped in a world of snow, ice, and inevitability."
