Inside & Out

by Darren Defrain

Eleven short stories told by a variety of first-person narrators roaming the United States from the West to Wisconsin.

197 pages, Paperback

First published October 13, 2008

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's an argument to be made about the relative virtues of variety versus consistency, and usually I will err on the side of lionizing variety, that I want a book to tackle lots of different moods and styles.... Darren's book doesn't do that, being, by and large, the monologues of white working class men who are down on their luck and up against the wall. The stories even have a similar shape, one to another, and more or less turn on the revelation of character based on some sort of identification, some employment of the pathetic fallacy or other.

None of this matters, though, because the stories really do work, the structure is durable enough to take some more exemplars, and Darren has crafted a really strong collection here. It doesn't do a hundred different things at once, but it does do what it does very very well.