Praise for Controlled Burn.
“Controlled Burn is good. Very good. Remarkable, actually. Tough, gritty, and honest—reminiscent of Hemingway with a little bit of John Steinbeck. Scott Wolven writes about an America that few of us have ever seen—and he writes about it from firsthand experience.” —Nelson Demille
“Wolven has turned raw, unreconciled life into startling, evocative, and very good short stories. He draws on a New England different from Updike’s and even Dubus’s, but his fictive lives—no less than theirs—render the world newly, and full of important consequence.” —Richard Ford
“Scott Wolven’s tales are tough, unsentimental, and completely earned. This is the most exciting, authentic collectio of short stories I have read in years. —George Pelecanos
KIRKUS STARRED REVIEW: CONTROLLED BURN (Scribner).
Thirteen stories track men who live and work in states with only one area code.
Keep your eye on these men without women. Newcomer Wolven’s females are either instrumental, like Ann, the one who inspires Mark’s fatal love in “Tigers,” or as hard as men themselves, like Ida, who comes up in “Taciturnity” with a uniquely brutal way of taking revenge on the cop who arrested her grandson for drug dealing. Some of the heroes are in stir, like Cooper, who’s trying his hardest to keep a low profile during the last few weeks before his release in “Outside Work Detail.” But even the ones who aren’t doing time are locked in their own prison of alcohol, drugs, and testosterone. So the narrator of “The Rooming House,” after his arrest for beating his second wife on the same spot where he beat his first, can reflect, “It sounded so strange to me, to think of [children and retirement] and to think it was already past me, that part of life.” Whether they’re working as unofficial private eyes (“The Copper Kings” and “Underdogs”), burning cornfields that hide marijuana plants (“Controlled Burn”), or volunteering as sparring partners to prizefighters (“El Rey”), the bad-dog savagery of Wolven’s males makes their flights into lyrical sweetness all the more dazzling and disturbing. “Crank” and “Ball Lightning Reported,” in fact, threaten to dissolve into white-hot prose poetry about what it feels like to be high on speed. Yet “Atomic Supernova,” for all the surrealism of its Nevada sheriff’s conviction that he’s been set apart from lesser humans by the radiation he absorbed, is powerful stuff, and “Tigers” an extraordinary meditation on the relation between life, growth, and death. A debut to treasure, a remarkably assured cycle of stories about men who’ll live in your heart even though you’ll be glad they don’t live next door.
Praise for The Best American Mystery Stories.
“Scott Wolven’s “Barracuda” [defies] expectations at virtually every turn, as willfully shapeless as life…cuts from scene to scene with the nervous energy of a hand-held camera. Equally memorable stories by Wolven have appeared in the last several volumes* of The Best American Mystery Series, each an exploration of violence among men who have been marginalized, and thus as dangerous as rogue elephants, in an economically ravaged society that places little value on traditional masculinity. For Wolven’s men—loggers, tree poachers, corrupt cops—the impulse to do terrible damage to one another is as natural as watching pit bulls tear one another to pieces for sport.” —Joyce Carol Oates
Scott Wolven’s stories appeared in seven consecutive issues of The Best American Mystery Stories, the most consecutive appearances in the history of the series. Issues he appeared in are pictured below.
More work by Scott Wolven.
The title story “Controlled Burn” features in The Best American Noir of the Century collection, Edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler.
The story “The Copper Kings” features in “20+1”, Short Stories by emblematic American authors, Edited by Francis Geffard of Albin Michel.