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Spit Baths: Stories
With a reporter's eye for the inside story and a historian's grasp of the ironies in our collective past, Greg Downs affectionately observes some of the last survivors of what Greil Marcus has called the old, weird America. Living off the map and out of sight, folks like Embee, Rudy, Peg, and Branch define themselves by where they are, not by what they eat, drink, or wear. The man who is soon to abandon his family in "Ain't I a King, Too?" is mistaken for the populist autocrat of Louisiana, Huey P. Long--on the day after Long's assassination. In "Hope Chests," a history teacher marries his student and takes her away from a place she hated, only to find that neither one of them can fully leave it behind. An elderly man in "Snack Cakes" enlists his grandson to help distribute his belongings among his many ex-wives, living and dead. In the title story, another intergenerational family tale, a young boy is caught in a feud between his mother and grandmother. The older woman uses the language of baseball to convey her view of religion and nobility to her grandson before the boy's mother takes him away, maybe forever. Caught up in pasts both personal and epic, Downs's characters struggle to maintain their peculiar, grounded manners in an increasingly detached world.
- GenresShort Stories
174 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 24, 2013
Wow. What a great first book. It's no surprise Greg won the Flannery O'Connor award for short fiction. While it's been a number of years since I last read a Flannery O'Connor story, Downs's writing reminds me exactly of O'Connor at at her best.
Greg has an amazing ability to create characters that are interesting and that you care about. And he does it with just a few pages; some best selling authors can't do with 300+ page novels.
The stories are not mysteries but they suspenseful. I greatly enjoyed the journeys to see where they would end up. Many wind up being set in or around rural Kentucky, further giving an O'Connor feel to the stories.
His prose is clean and eminently readable, like Vonnegut at his best.
Only one story, Field Trip, fell flat for me. If you find yourself bored with Field Trip, you can skip to the next story, you won't miss anything. As for the other stories, they are all winners.
After years (sometimes decades) of owning them, I am liberating most of our books after I read them. But not this one. This one is a keeper. I'm sure many of the stories will linger in my memory like some of Flannery O'Connor's despite me not have read an O'Connor story in over a decade.
Greg has an amazing ability to create characters that are interesting and that you care about. And he does it with just a few pages; some best selling authors can't do with 300+ page novels.
The stories are not mysteries but they suspenseful. I greatly enjoyed the journeys to see where they would end up. Many wind up being set in or around rural Kentucky, further giving an O'Connor feel to the stories.
His prose is clean and eminently readable, like Vonnegut at his best.
Only one story, Field Trip, fell flat for me. If you find yourself bored with Field Trip, you can skip to the next story, you won't miss anything. As for the other stories, they are all winners.
After years (sometimes decades) of owning them, I am liberating most of our books after I read them. But not this one. This one is a keeper. I'm sure many of the stories will linger in my memory like some of Flannery O'Connor's despite me not have read an O'Connor story in over a decade.
August 6, 2011
quirky, broken, splintered, covered in weeds and weirds and reeking of Apple pie..an American classic.
September 5, 2025
Wow. What a great first book. It's no surprise Greg won the Flannery O'Connor award for short fiction. While it's been a number of years since I last read a Flannery O'Connor story, Downs's writing reminds me exactly of O'Connor at at her best.
Greg has an amazing ability to create characters that are interesting and that you care about. And he does it with just a few pages; some best selling authors can't do with 300+ page novels.
The stories are not mysteries but they suspenseful. I greatly enjoyed the journeys to see where they would end up. Many wind up being set in or around rural Kentucky, further giving an O'Connor feel to the stories.
His prose is clean and eminently readable, like Vonnegut at his best.
Only one story, Field Trip, fell flat for me. If you find yourself bored with Field Trip, you can skip to the next story, you won't miss anything. As for the other stories, they are all winners.
After years (sometimes decades) of owning them, I am liberating most of our books after I read them. But not this one. This one is a keeper. I'm sure many of the stories will linger in my memory like some of Flannery O'Connor's despite me not have read an O'Connor story in over a decade.
Greg has an amazing ability to create characters that are interesting and that you care about. And he does it with just a few pages; some best selling authors can't do with 300+ page novels.
The stories are not mysteries but they suspenseful. I greatly enjoyed the journeys to see where they would end up. Many wind up being set in or around rural Kentucky, further giving an O'Connor feel to the stories.
His prose is clean and eminently readable, like Vonnegut at his best.
Only one story, Field Trip, fell flat for me. If you find yourself bored with Field Trip, you can skip to the next story, you won't miss anything. As for the other stories, they are all winners.
After years (sometimes decades) of owning them, I am liberating most of our books after I read them. But not this one. This one is a keeper. I'm sure many of the stories will linger in my memory like some of Flannery O'Connor's despite me not have read an O'Connor story in over a decade.
April 4, 2008
This Flannery O'Connor Award winning collection is well-crafted, full of traditional literary fiction horsepower--metaphors, symbolism, allegory--plus it artistically renders and comments on racial themes while only occasionally slipping into a moralistic point of view. It's the kind of collection that I know I'm supposed to like, and although I can admire much of the literary technique employed, the stories just didn't resonate or excite enough to make me a raving fan. Maybe the techniques are too obviously on display and that's what kept pushing me out of the story, made me shift from reader to analyzer. I'll keep it the stack for some work I'm doing on short story theory and may add some commentary to this review later.
July 26, 2011
. This is a short story collection. The stories are told almost entirely in scene. There are a mix of narrators: 1st, 3rd limited, 3rd omniscient. Topics vary, but often concern racial issues, especially mixed marriages or lovers. Lots of dysfunctional characters and relationships. I saw flaws, but it’s basically good writing. I’m not sure I’d read it again.
May 30, 2012
I'm glad I got this one from the library because I'd be mad if I paid for it :). The stories weren't "bad" but I just didn't find too much that resonated with me. There are only instances in certain stories that I remember rather than the entire stories. I give it a big Meh...
April 6, 2007
This Award-winning short story collection is highly overrated in my opinion. There were only a few stories that I connected with.
June 4, 2007
Flannery O'Connor award winner
December 10, 2010
Interesting, never have been so hot with short stories but these are unlike anything I've ever read before. I don't know if I like it. However I love the cover and the chapter title fonts.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews