The stories in Miracle Boy and Other Stories are filled with grit, tragedy, beauty, cruelty and love, as well as the improbable, the fantastic, and the just plain strange. Not to mention madness. As the narrator says in Bridge of Sighs, “sometimes they go a little batty.” He’s referring to farmers whose cattle are killed by traveling extermination men to combat Gadrene Swine (a biblical plague). Affected most by the mass killings is the narrator, one exterminator’s young son who assists his father as he executes cattle by the dozens.

There’s the madness of the overworked cuckold farmer, of a man whose dead uncle is actually his father, of the middle son of a farm family who never quite fit in - the sole survivor of a methane accident. Many of the stories take place on farms. They link the never ending monotony and drudgery of farm work with insanity and flights of fancy. In The Beginnings of Sorrow, a man and his dog begin to change places, with repercussions that expand beyond their world.

Pig Helmet & The Wall of Life, with its tale of violent death, disfiguration, serpents, and biblical references is reminiscent of the work of Harry Crews.

There’s also beauty. Mercy, about what happens when miniature horses move in next to a working farm where a young boy lives, is a splash of sunlight in the collection. A potential dark side to the story is what accentuates the beauty.

Every story in Pinckney Benedict’s collection is genuine, original, and worth reading. ( )

Highly praised in the internet bookshops, I have only read the first story so far,and am quite impressed.