My Top Ten Books of 2014

After I stopped drinking in May of this year my brain started resetting by June.  Pistons started firing that hadn't fired in years.  I could concentrate a little better.  I wondered, among other things, how in the world I had written and published two books under those conditions.  Another thing, I could read again.

It's embarrassing to admit, but I read only a handful of books during the last five years I spent drinking.  These were books my friends of mine, some sent to me as gifts, others reviewed here and there.  In total, I barely needed a third hand for help in counting them.

So I started reading again.

It began with a collection called The Uncertainty Principle by Rob McCellan (whose name I think I'm not suppose to capitalize but can't help it).  I reviewed his collection for Necessary Fiction and then, realizing I hadn't struggled with reading it, picked up some more.  After a bit, I started a reading log.  I've cataloged a lot of books since then, but am going to pick my top ten of 2014 in following with end-of-year lists I've been seeing, for whatever mine's worth.

These books, all published in 2014, are in no particular order.

GALAGA by Michael Kimball

For a book that is about a video game from back in the day, this is an amazing look into not only that game and that magical time period when a quarter could buy you an entire evening of entertainment, but also a love story and an adventure and a family history.  I knew so little about the game when I took this one to review, I thought Michael had written some kind of science fiction novel.  Overall, this one just absolutely floored me in every way possible.  See my full thoughts at Small Press Book Review here.

WOLF IN WHITE VAN by John Darnielle

The secrets in this one are handled just perfectly.  We all knew Darnielle good write some kickass songs.  Now we know he can make the novel sing, too.  For one thing, I swear to all that's holy the role-playing game in this book, the imagination it took to come up with it is an achievement all of its own.  Told in the first-person from the point of view of a man whose face is grossly disfigured following an accident, this novel has maybe one of the best tied together beginning and end I read this year.

HIGH AS THE HORSE'S BRIDLE by Scott Cheshire

Bought this one after a ton of recommendations.  Put it on the shelf and sort of forgot about it for awhile.  One evening I pulled it and took on the porch with me for a evening smoke, figuring I'd just scan the first couple paragraphs.  That first chapter is damn near hypnotic.  Maybe the best first chapter I've ever read.  The rest of the book was good, but good lord that start was fantastic.  There's a lot said of religion here, but also the relationship between fathers and sons, and that relationship as it can often pertain to the passing of time.  A well-handled debut novel.

EXCAVATION: A MEMOIR by Wendy C. Ortiz

Wendy C. Ortiz's memoir absolutely at times made my stomach hurt.  I mean it made me physically ill at times.  All the while raising me from my seat to applaud its strength and absolute mastery.  The story of how her teacher manipulated her as a pre-teen and held her in this sickening grasp for the entirety of her teen years was both appalling in its subject matter and breathtakingly beautiful in its execution.  I cannot remember having read a braver work of nonfiction.

DON'T START ME TALKIN' by Tom Williams

There's no secret as to why I loved this novel.  I would like to say it's Tom's command as a novelist (and that's for sure the second reason) but the first reason is simply that I have an addictive love of the blues or anything blues related.  That said, what I found most interesting, the aspect of this book that held me in place while reading, was the behind-the-curtain aspect of it all, the way Brother Ben and Silent Sam become the roles they play.

THE FUN WE'VE HAD by Michael J Seidlinger

I love a book that takes a risk, jumps off Bradbury's cliff and works to build its wings on the way down.  The Fun We've Had was the one book that I read that came out this year that perfectly nailed this for me.  Not going to lie, I struggled with it.  I became lost at times, I became bored at times. But at the end of it all, I just held my breath and realized Michael took a huge risk and finished up pretty clean, and good for him.

A TREE BORN CROOKED by Steph Post

Steph Post writes some amazing and gritty work.  When I first learned this book existed in the world I had seen a post from Steph and the title caught my eye.  I immediately left a comment saying I once wrote a short story with the same title, adding with a wink that I had stolen the title from a Tom Waits song.  She said the same, and I was immediately a fan.  Then I read the book.  Wow, people. Hardcore Florida.  Not beaches and thongs and muscles Florida. This is the real shit.  I reviewed it at Revolution John.

ABOVE ALL MEN by Eric Shonkwiler

This is another novel I reviewed at Revolution John.  And it was a tough one to review, let me just say.  I wanted the review to somehow reflect how hard Eric had clearly worked on this book.  It's so well built, I mean brick cigar house built.  Another debut, Above All Men is a fully realized not too distant future, a fully realized set of characters, and on and on.  Most of the time with a debut a reader can point to at least one or two things that blows the cover on it being a first book.  Not this one.  Not a single flaw this reader found.

CRYSTAL EATERS by Shane Jones

Man was there ever a buzz going around about this novel.  And I had read or heard about all of it when American Book Review asked if I would be interested in reviewing it back in the summer.  I was just about a month into my newly rediscovered ability to read while not drunk, and was a little worried I wouldn't "get" it.  But, of course, those concerns were needless.  Shane Jones put his sweat and blood into this one and came out with a book that is like no other you'll read, this or any year, and as accessible as you could hope for. Purely original, something insanely difficult to achieve these day.

IN THE SEASON OF BLOOD AND GOLD by Taylor Brown

Taylor, I believe, just got a book deal for a novel, and it's one of those times when you've read the guy's short stories and now the excitement can start building for a full-length work.  Because here's the thing: Taylor Brown wrote, in my opinion, the best short story collection this year.  In the Season of Blood and Gold restores faith in the short story as a form.  It's that simple.











As an end note, let me add there are several books that came out this year I'm still reading that might have made this list.  Among those are Preparations for the Next Life by Atticus Lish, Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay, 10:04 by Ben Lerner, Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, and The Baltimore Atrocities by John Dermot Woods.

Damn, what a stellar year for publishing.

That Alone Is Heaven Enough

 A couple cool things coming up for me in the next while.

Karen McElmurray will be co-editing an anthology due out from Ohio University Press this coming spring.  Thanks to Karen (and to Chris Offutt for sending my name along to her) I'll have an essay called "Dangerous Stories" in that anthology.  There's a lot of great writers who'll be in this one, and I'm always happy to be included in fine company.  I'll be talking more about this as the time gets nearer to publication.

Another essay of mine called "Thanks, Breece" will be published soon (not sure when the next issue is out) of Mad Hatters' Review.

This one is close to my heart for two reasons.  One, because Pancake is the one, for me, who said it was okay.  And, two, because MHR was the brain child of Carol Novack.  Carol and Ryan W. Bradley remain the only two people in the indie lit community who I've actually spoken to IRL, as they say.

Carol and I had been exchanging emails, etc. back in 2008 over the course of about two weeks when she called me one day at the newspaper where I worked.  I'm still not sure how she pulled that one off.  She didn't spend time with small talk but, instead, went straight into talking about whatever the last thing was we had emailed about.  It was this bold, strange, and surprising thing that happened.  It was totally a Carol moment.  I'll never forget that.

So, happy on two levels, yes.

I don't know, it feels like there's more going on than that, but I guess it's just an overall good feeling for me lately.  That's probably the thing I'm thinking of.  This month will make six months, a half year, that I've been sober.  This one is off the charts cool because it's had a hugely positive impact on everything for me.  I've been more clear-headed, more productive on every level, happier, more content, reading more, writing more, loving more.  Just everything.  It's amazing.

I've posted a few things on Facebook about my sobriety and want to take time again here to thank everyone who responded and said kind things or offered any words of encouragement or shared stories with me one-on-one about their own struggles.  Can't tell you how much I truly appreciate that.  It's a shitdog of an existence, being a drunk.  Things are better now.  This alone is heaven enough.

My Offering for the Creative Process Blog Tour

Haven't kicked around here in the old halls in a good while.  For that, and for those who may follow along here, my apologies.  I've been focusing a lot of attention on my new online journal Revolution John lately, but I shouldn't just forget my Bent Country, all the same.

Here's the thing: I was invited by Karen McElmurrary to take part in The Virtual Blog Tour, an ongoing exercise between writers, artists, musicians, and other creatives.  We each write posts answering questions about our creative process and what we have going on lately and then invite three people to do the same. It's a good way to spread the word about your own work and the work of others, as well as giving some people the chance to pick up on someone they may have overlooked along the way.

A little about Karen ---

She writes both fiction and creative nonfiction. Her memoir, Surrendered Child, won the AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction and was listed as a “notable book” by the National Book Critics Circle. She is also the author of Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven (University of Georgia Press), a novel that won the Lillie Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing and, most recently, The Motel of the Stars, part of the 2009 Linda Bruckheimer Series from Sarabande Books.

She has an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Virginia, an MA in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a PhD from the University of Georgia, where she studied American Literature and Fiction Writing. Her work has received numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She is frequently visiting writer and lecturer at a variety of programs and reading series.

Yeah, she rocks.

Karen's work as always just floored me, and we come from the same hollers around eastern Kentucky, so that's always cool. Have a look at her website here, and take a look at her blog post for this tour here.

So, now for the questions.


1. What are you currently working on?

A few projects.  One is in the editing stage, a novella called Brown Bottle that will be out from Artistically Declined Press late summer of next year.

The other is a collection of stories titled 1,000.  This collection will include 50 photographs by Heather McCoy from which I will write stories of exactly 1,000 words as an endeavor to mix the two art forms.  I'm talking with Foxhead Books about publishing this book, but it's not officially attached to a press as of yet.

In addition to these two books, I'm also editing a draft of a novel called Dysphoria, which may end up back in the trunk before it's all said and done.  I wrote the first draft of this one while an undergrad and can't seem to let it go.  It deals a lot with fathers and sons and mental illness and addiction and how that relationship and those two things can tear you down sometimes.  It was my attempt to purge my dad as a subject in my writing.  It's still close to my heart, so I'm reworking it now, more than a decade later.


2. How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I don't write with genre in mind, but have been called both an Appalachian writer and a Southern writer, so I'll look at this question in that light, I suppose.

There are it seems two schools of thought, or at least two, when it comes to Appalachian literature - you have those who write of days gone by with a sense of what I can perhaps best describe as an infused nostalgia and then those who write about contemporary Appalachia, mostly focusing on the more gritty issues.  Both have their readerships and merit, to an extent, but I tend to write in the latter, though never very consciously. But at the end of it all, I'm just trying to do what any writer worth their salt is doing and that's tell a good story.

3. Why do you write what you do?

I'm sometimes terrible at answering these kinds of questions, but I'll give it a try. 

I like telling stories is about the size of it.  I know some writers will say they're driven to write, and I've said that in interviews before and I guess it's true, but it's honestly just that I enjoy telling stories and seeing people enjoy them.  Entertaining other people is a fine way to spend your time, and anyone creating something for others could do a lot worse than remembering that one thing.  Every good book or painting or song I've enjoyed seemed to me a product of the person creating it enjoying it first and then wanting to share it with me.  So I do what I do to entertain people and myself.


4. How does your writing process work?

One thing I've been I guess ashamed of in the past (and I'm not sure why now that I've come to terms with it) is that I have a title idea and then the story or book or essay or whatever comes after that.  I have no idea why I would be ashamed of that except that it maybe seemed shallow or something, or I thought other people would think so at least.

But a nice title will get my mind started, and things usually go from there.  At that point, depending on where I'm at, I'll either 1) grab my composition book (always the black and white speckled kind) and a pencil (always a Mirado Black Warrior No.2) and jot down a few paragraphs, or 2) hit the laptop and get started. The getting started always starts with the new title.  Some stories I've written in this way include "Go Get Your Honor" (which I came up with from a misheard lyric while listening to music) "Somebody Take Care of Little Walter" (which came up when my cousin once said this to our bass player when we were all in a band together because I was too drunk to sing the song we were working on) and "The Last Tour of Loretta Lynn's Homeplace" (which came to me after visiting her homeplace in Johnson County, Kentucky and thinking that her brother would love nothing better than to stop doing the tours).  For books, it has been some different.

Okay, so now here are the three writers I've invited to take part in this blog tour.  Click their names to visit either their websites or affiliated pages.


Ryan W. Bradley

Ryan W. Bradley has pumped gas, painted houses, swept a mechanic’s shop, done construction in the Arctic Circle, fronted a punk band, and managed a children’s bookstore. He now designs book covers and works in merchandising and marketing for an audiobook publisher. Born in Alaska, he received his MFA from Pacific University and now lives in southern Oregon with his wife and two sons.

He is the author of four chapbooks; a story collection; a novel, Code for Failure; and three poetry collections, including The Waiting Tide. He also collaborated with David Tomaloff on the poetry collection, You Are Jaguar. His novella, Winterswim is forthcoming in late 2014.

Stephen Dale Marlowe

Stephen Dale Marlowe is an author, professor, and lawyer.  As Dale Marlowe, his essays and fiction have appeared in various publications, including Owl Farm, The Tippecanoe Gazette, Global Voices, The Dayton Daily News, The Miami Review, Hispanic Outlook, The National Jurist, Metazen, The Weekly, and Emic.

Steve graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2002.  Since 2004, he has been a features columnist at Chapati Mystery, where he writes under the nom de guerre Farangi.  A collection of stories, Digging Up The Bones, The Weight of This Life, a graphic novel (with Aaron Linderman), and Honky Fatwas, a retrospective chronicling a decade's-worth of essays for Chaptai Mystery, are each scheduled for 2015.

He is COO at Potemkin Media Omnibus, Ltd.  Steve has been a member of Edison State Community College's English faculty since 2005.

Chris Offutt

Chris Offutt is the author of five books - Kentucky Straight, The Same River Twice, The Good Brother, Out of the Woods, and No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home.

His work has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting Foundation.  In 1996, he was named one of the twenty best young American fiction writers by Granta.

He currently teaches at the University of Mississippi and lives in Oxford.


Alright.  Write hard, good people, and have fun.

The Past Week Was Like A Fever Dream

Haven't really dropped in here and just rambled in a good while, and, since there's plenty to talk about here in Comptonland, I think I'll do that.

Okay, where to start?  I'll go backwards.

This morning I learned from Artistically Declined Press publisher and editor Ryan W. Bradley that ADP will publish my first novel, BROWN BOTTLE, late summer of next year.  What!?!  Yep, you heard me, gang. That just happened.

Now, just before that, I think about two or three days ago, a call for associate editors for the nationally known literary journal Night Train was put out by Rusty Barnes.  I expressed interest and can now say I am this very thing, along with some other fine writers and editors.

Before this, early last week, I got a call from Jay Hill out of West Virginia.  He asked if I wanted to take part in a podcast interview with him at his home in Boone County for his preservation project The Hollow and the Plow.  I went.  It was awesome. Jay is awesome. He even took me to nearby Milton, W. Va. to visit the grave of my favorite writer, Breece Pancake (more to come about this visit later).  My god this boy is one awesome guy.

All this coming at the same time my second story collection, WHERE ALLIGATORS SLEEP, is to be released from Foxhead Books this fall, as it has been sent to press just last week.

Now that's one amazing week for a writer.  It's good to be in the company of amazing editors and writers and see good things happen.  That's it.  I am beside myself.  Hi self.

Where Alligators Sleep ARCs Available

I have digital ARC copies available for those interested in reviewing my upcoming second fiction collection WHERE ALLIGATORS SLEEP.  Email me at shelcompton@gmail.com if interested in receiving and reviewing, good people.  And thanks in advance.

Jason Donnelly's desk (maybe?) only moments after asking for his ARC.

Reading Notes Since the Big One

Been doing some good reading lately, ever since my heart attack about a month ago.  Sometimes it goes that way. Other times I read books and hit a run I don't really care for, but read them because I can learn from bad writing, too.  At those times, it really is work, the reading - the way the writing is work every day.

I swear I think the surge in reading interest is because of the newly unblocked blood flow to my brain. Leading up to having a stent placed in my right coronary artery, my reading list had been stuck in the mud. I'm actually embarrassed to say how few books I read in the last year.

But that's not been the case lately.  Not at all.

It started with Michael Kimball's GALAGA, which I linked to here a couple posts back or so.  Fine book. Then it was Rob McClennan's THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE.  I reviewed both of these, with Kimball's appearing at The Small Press Book Review.  McClennan's review will be published July 28 or thereabouts at Necessary Fiction.

Then it was on to Shane Jones's CRYSTAL EATERS.  My review of this book (built like a brick cigar house and without wasting a single word) will be published in American Book Review in August.

In the past week, I've had the great pleasure of reading Christine Schutt's NIGHTWORK, a reread of Chris Offutt's OUT OF THE WOODS, George Saunders's TENTH OF DECEMBER, and Ben Marcus's THE AGE OF WIRE AND STRING. All of these very good reads, especially TENTH OF DECEMBER and the reread of Chris's best collection, in my opinion. In fact, I would firmly place TOD in the great category. Best use of voice I've come across in maybe forever. Saunders is pretty much a genius.

Now I'm reading MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS by Kelly Link and CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA by Frank Bill.  These two go together nicely - Link with her magical worlds in this collection and Bill keeping things beautifully grounded with some gritty realism set not far from the place and culture I write about most days.  Both are good at what they do.

On tap for reading in the next month or so: CODE FOR FAILURE by Ryan W. Bradley; COLLECTED STORIES of Amy Hempel; COAST OF CHICAGO by Stuart Dybek; TOWNIE: A MEMOIR by Andre Dubus III; BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison; THE FAST RED ROAD: A PLAINSONG by Stephen Graham Jones.

Read hard.

ALWAYS WHERE I CAN SEE IT NOW

It’s almost like there’s a little valve in my head and if I can throw it on a given day, something will come out. It’s never planned. It’s just kind of a blurt. So in a sense my whole life as a writer is trying to find structural ways, or formal ways, to permit that outflowing so it doesn’t just look like crazy output. In other words, if it turns out that you can do a given voice, that’s just kind of inclination. But then if you can find a way to put that voice in a story so that the voice serves a purpose, then I would say that’s being a writer.

                                                                                                                     – GEORGE SAUNDERS