Playing Out of the Deep Woods: Stories - Softcover

Hawkes, G. W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826209882 ISBN 13: 9780826209887

Publisher: Univ of Missouri Pr, 1995

Synopsis

Every year, as the autumnal equinox approaches, an Accident strikes Oracle, Kansas. This year, it begins with Ruth Montgomery. In the days and weeks that follow her fall in her living room, she suffers headaches and a strange feeling of coldness. But eerier still, friends stop speaking to her on the streets as she slowly but surely slips out of her neighbors' consciousness.
Many of the characters in G. W. Hawkes's second collection, Playing Out of the Deep Woods, have had accidents, of sorts. Whether their accidents are physical, like Ruth Montgomery's fall in "Always Cold," or emotional, like that of Prophet in "The Last American Living in Cuba," or spiritual, like that of Jack Armstrong in "The Movable Hazard," characters find themselves ripped from their everyday lives and plunged into the extraordinary. Sometimes moments of epiphany result, as when a young scientist unwittingly discovers the connectedness of life in the mystical story "The Foundation." At other times the result is nightmarish, as in "Pull, Ponies, Pull, My Dearhearts" when an unnamed traveler attempts to destroy a town by pulling down the ancient monolith that anchors the place.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

With varying degrees of success, Hawkes's second collection of stories explores everything from golf to Peeping Toms to an absurd Alice in Wonderland-like trial during the Vietnam War. Imaginative ideas share these tales with credible characters: The title story, for instance, depicts two golfing couples who venture into a thicket after lost balls. In the dark tangle, each character is faced with either nightmare or fantasy before staggering back onto the manicured green or disappearing forever. ``He'd been a machine inside a machine, ordered, perfect, but now the wail escaped him again and rose up into the branches.'' Hawkes frets at the line between private, emotional chaos and the public, controlled world. He nimbly treads this edge again in ``Peeper,'' in which seeing through a voyeur's eyes is made inviting and his actions forgivable. Other particularly insightful stories are ``Mutiny,'' about an aging man's bravado, and ``Always Cold,'' which tells of a freak accident and a social death. A few of the tales, however, suffer from poor pacing and unravel either too slowly or too mechanically. For example, ``The Shortest Hole'' (not unlike a damaged version of Roald Dahl's ``Parson's Pleasure'') too predictably records an obsessed man's ruination and reads like an exercise rather than a living story. At worst, Hawkes's fables make nice vignettes, but more often they linger on.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of Missouri Pr
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0826209882
• ISBN 13: 9780826209887
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 141