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Refresh, Refresh: Stories
The war in Iraq empties the small town of Tumalo, Oregon, of men—of fathers—leaving their sons to fight among themselves. But the boys' bravado fades at home when, alone, they check e-mail again and again for word from their fathers at the front.Often from fractured homes and communities, the young men in these breathless stories do the unthinkable to prove to themselves—to everyone—that they are strong enough to face the heartbreak in this world. Set in rural Oregon with the shadow of the Cascade Mountains hanging over them, these stories bring you face-to-face with a mad bear, a house with a basement that opens up into a cave, a nuclear meltdown that renders the Pacific Northwest into a contemporary Wild West. Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy is a bold, fiery, and unforgettable collection that deals with vital issues of our time.
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 1, 2005
26 people are currently reading
664 people want to read
About the author
Benjamin Percy
803 books1,209 followersBenjamin Percy is the author of seven novels -- most recently The Sky Vault (William Morrow) -- three short fiction collections, and a book of essays, Thrill Me, that is widely taught in creative writing classrooms. He writes Wolverine, X-Force, and Ghost Rider for Marvel Comics. His fiction and nonfiction have been published in Esquire (where he is a contributing editor), GQ, Time, Men's Journal, Outside, the Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and the Paris Review. His honors include an NEA fellowship, the Whiting Writer's Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, the iHeart Radio Award for Best Scripted Podcast, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 127 reviews
November 10, 2009
I really should dock a star because of the over familiarity of the themes - Meltdown for instance is a post nuclear accident story similar to The Road, and in another a father and son come across a body on a hunting expedition, much like Carver's So Much Water So Close to Home - and maybe for its extreme masculinity: women hardly feature except as longed-for or disgusted-by creatures. These are mostly Iraq war stories, but set in the Oregon towns the soldiers leave or come back to and the protagonists are often the ones left behind. Refresh Refresh refers to a son checking his emails from his father which become less and less frequent as he enters the combat zone. Most feature hunting, shooting, motorbiking, drinking, knifing. An ex-soldier keeps a sawn off foot in a bucket of formaldehyde, another watches the bullet blast towards him and screws up his face to absorb it. A softball portion of his skull comes off and strikes the wall behind him with a red and gray splatter. He slumps back and his beer tips over and gurgles across the table in a foaming rush.
There's so much death about - deer and bear as well as human - that you may feel like the pilot who transports body bags: some of them leak through their zippers.. a smell coming from them, the rottenness brought on by humidity. It got into your clothes and hair like cigarette smoke, so badly that a Saigon whore once refused him until he showered, and even then she kept her face turned away.
However the stories are done with such panache, such attention to the feel, the smell, the sound of things, that you feel each bump and hurt. Here two boys go biking in the snow: Our engines filled the white silence of the afternoon. Our back tires kicked up plumes of powder, and on sharp turns slipped out beneath us and we lay there, in the middle of the road, bleeding, laughing, unafraid.
Another vehicle/weather passage: A drizzle starts, dotting the windshield. The drizzle thickens into a rain, coming down in gray sheets the wipers can't keep up with. And then the air blurs and thickens with swirling white as the hail begins. The world takes on a big rattle.. The hailstones drum down against the hood and the roof and the windshiled and he can feel the vibrations in his fingers - his fingers wrapped tighlty around the wheel, fighting the wind and the uncertain surface of the road
You understand the inarticulacy of these men. I particualrly liked the least bloody one which depicts a grumpy man having to accept a returning soldier to accompany him on his tedious job and the budding father-son substitute relationship that ensues in Somebody is Going to Have to Pay for This. And also the souring of a marriage after the discovery of an ectopic pregnancy in The Faulty Builder: When the doctor removed it - it had a thatch of black hair and a scrunched up face, teeth - he determined it had been inside her for many years - dead - curled up in the dark muddy pocket of her belly.
You might want to look away, you might dislike the protagonists, flawed, disturbed, sometimes brutal, but the writing seeps, sometimes blasts straight into you. Powerful and gripping.
There's so much death about - deer and bear as well as human - that you may feel like the pilot who transports body bags: some of them leak through their zippers.. a smell coming from them, the rottenness brought on by humidity. It got into your clothes and hair like cigarette smoke, so badly that a Saigon whore once refused him until he showered, and even then she kept her face turned away.
However the stories are done with such panache, such attention to the feel, the smell, the sound of things, that you feel each bump and hurt. Here two boys go biking in the snow: Our engines filled the white silence of the afternoon. Our back tires kicked up plumes of powder, and on sharp turns slipped out beneath us and we lay there, in the middle of the road, bleeding, laughing, unafraid.
Another vehicle/weather passage: A drizzle starts, dotting the windshield. The drizzle thickens into a rain, coming down in gray sheets the wipers can't keep up with. And then the air blurs and thickens with swirling white as the hail begins. The world takes on a big rattle.. The hailstones drum down against the hood and the roof and the windshiled and he can feel the vibrations in his fingers - his fingers wrapped tighlty around the wheel, fighting the wind and the uncertain surface of the road
You understand the inarticulacy of these men. I particualrly liked the least bloody one which depicts a grumpy man having to accept a returning soldier to accompany him on his tedious job and the budding father-son substitute relationship that ensues in Somebody is Going to Have to Pay for This. And also the souring of a marriage after the discovery of an ectopic pregnancy in The Faulty Builder: When the doctor removed it - it had a thatch of black hair and a scrunched up face, teeth - he determined it had been inside her for many years - dead - curled up in the dark muddy pocket of her belly.
You might want to look away, you might dislike the protagonists, flawed, disturbed, sometimes brutal, but the writing seeps, sometimes blasts straight into you. Powerful and gripping.
February 9, 2020
This was a sucker punch I wasn't expecting.
Refresh, Refresh is a stunning collection of short fiction set in Central Oregon. The darkness of the Iraq war touches many of these stories, but this is not a war book. These stories feature the fathers and sons and friends and wives and children touched by that seemingly endless conflict, and what it looks like from rural, poor America. There's so much pain here, of all kinds. Percy explores husbands and wives contending with their marriages, the horrendous grief from losing a loved one suddenly, broken hearts and, even simply getting old. The emotional range here is amazing.
Don't get me wrong though, this is a super masculine collection of stories. All of them are about white men, with male narrators, and there are few female characters at all. It's full of hunting, blood and guts and pickup trucks. I knew this going in from the reviews, so I was a bit wary of how I would like a short story collection from that narrow of a perspective, but I was completely wrong. I think Percy captures an intensely broad range of emotions with interesting characters and well written plots that it more than makes up for the lack of diversity in these stories. I understand this info might be a deal breaker for some readers, but I thought this was a fantastic achievement anyway.
Unlike most contemporary short fiction I read that seems to always take place in a nondescript Every Man type of city, this collection is deeply tied to it's sense of place and the people who live there. His writing beautifully captured the western landscape, making it come alive in a way that can only be captured by someone intimately familiar with the unique area. I loved it.
Normally I would name my favorite stories here, but I couldn't pick just a few. Only "Meltdown" was sort of meh for me. All of the others are standouts.
Refresh, Refresh is a stunning collection of short fiction set in Central Oregon. The darkness of the Iraq war touches many of these stories, but this is not a war book. These stories feature the fathers and sons and friends and wives and children touched by that seemingly endless conflict, and what it looks like from rural, poor America. There's so much pain here, of all kinds. Percy explores husbands and wives contending with their marriages, the horrendous grief from losing a loved one suddenly, broken hearts and, even simply getting old. The emotional range here is amazing.
Don't get me wrong though, this is a super masculine collection of stories. All of them are about white men, with male narrators, and there are few female characters at all. It's full of hunting, blood and guts and pickup trucks. I knew this going in from the reviews, so I was a bit wary of how I would like a short story collection from that narrow of a perspective, but I was completely wrong. I think Percy captures an intensely broad range of emotions with interesting characters and well written plots that it more than makes up for the lack of diversity in these stories. I understand this info might be a deal breaker for some readers, but I thought this was a fantastic achievement anyway.
Unlike most contemporary short fiction I read that seems to always take place in a nondescript Every Man type of city, this collection is deeply tied to it's sense of place and the people who live there. His writing beautifully captured the western landscape, making it come alive in a way that can only be captured by someone intimately familiar with the unique area. I loved it.
Normally I would name my favorite stories here, but I couldn't pick just a few. Only "Meltdown" was sort of meh for me. All of the others are standouts.
December 6, 2007
*sigh*
This is a second collection that reads like a first. Honest to god, these stories came fresh from an MFA workshop, filtered through a thesis reading and went straight to video. He has a workman-like concept of plot -- the stories get to all the right places, but in a plodding, paint by number sort of way with no compelling voice and a lot of sophomoric sloppiness when it comes to language.
I also feel that a good deal of grunting and adjusting of the balls occurred during the making of this book. It walks with its crotch thrust forward.
In all fairness, I've been reading the shit out of Annie Proulx and everyone sucks compared to her.
This is a second collection that reads like a first. Honest to god, these stories came fresh from an MFA workshop, filtered through a thesis reading and went straight to video. He has a workman-like concept of plot -- the stories get to all the right places, but in a plodding, paint by number sort of way with no compelling voice and a lot of sophomoric sloppiness when it comes to language.
I also feel that a good deal of grunting and adjusting of the balls occurred during the making of this book. It walks with its crotch thrust forward.
In all fairness, I've been reading the shit out of Annie Proulx and everyone sucks compared to her.
January 17, 2026
IDK it's just missing any sincerity and after finishing all I could think was "so what?" Like there's not much you will learn. Somebody said it's like an MFA project and I have to agree. Hits all the points a professor would grade highly. But missing the essence and feels inauthentic. Also didn't like how the author was over explaining characters' inner states, leaving nothing to the reader.
February 16, 2021
So so good!
July 11, 2020
Dark, well-written stories about working class families in blue collar jobs who like to hunt and fish, set in the Pacific Northwest. Rather dark.
November 29, 2010
I guess I’m a little cynical. I lost faith in the short story? Did I? Is that it? When I read, I’m hopeful. And, despite my faithlessness, I am sometimes surprised.
Let’s see. I bought their books after reading Richard Russo’s “Horseman,” Roy Kesey’s “Wait,” Nathan Englander’s “How We Avenged the Blums,” and William Gay’s, “Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?” Lorrie Moore has been pretty influential. Kyle Minor gave me a Flannery O’Connor epiphany with “A Day Meant to Do Less.” And I’m still in love with Tim O’Brien’s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED.
Sometimes I hold the stories up to my own fierce literary theories about the redemptive end (see my essay on “Lost,” which is out there somewhere). Sometimes I read stuff and just forget about it. But sometimes I read something and take notes.
Okay, let’s not call me “cynical.” Let’s use “eclectic” instead.
So I just finished Benjamin Percy’s REFRESH, REFRESH.
This is one of the good ones. I’m not sure it really meets my whole redemptive-end-standards, but these are good stories with meaning and resolution. They’re also fairly, hmm, masculine. I can tell a guy wrote them. I hope that’s okay to say. I know I don’t like when people say that I write for women (I don’t!)—but I’m okay if you say I write like a girl. These are stories written by a guy, though they’re not enmeshed in that Hemingway macho stuff. There is, however, a fair amount of hunting and fishing.
But, ultimately, they’re stories for men and women. Perhaps they deal with a universal concern. They ask, if you will, the secularized version of the question posed by theologian Francis Schaeffer, “How shall we then live?” Soldiers return home from Iraq. How shall we then live? Marriages sour. How shall we then live? A car crash kills. How shall we then live? A father abandons his family. How shall we then live?
I liked most of the stories, but my favorites were “The Caves of Oregon,” “Meltdown,” and “Crash.” “The Caves of Oregon” plays a little, maybe, with Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” (okay, I’m probably making this up)—but I like stories about marriages that contain the sweetness and the pitfalls of commitment. Good marriage stories are kinda rare. “Meltdown” reminded me a little of THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy, and a little of THE ROAD WARRIOR, the movie (Mel Gibson, circa my late childhood). But there were things in this story that weren’t in THE ROAD—and their absence in McCarthy always bugged me! This story had context! A reason for its apocalyptic reality! The protagonist had a history! That is serious cause for celebration! And then “Crash.” (Yeah, I have my own car crash story.) I liked this for a number of reasons. Part of it has to do with marriage again. The protagonist is destroyed over the death of his wife; however, it wasn’t a marriage or a life he dreamed about. He married the high school girlfriend because she was pregnant. He didn’t go out into the world to study international politics. He didn’t live in a big, beautiful house. He lived with his wife and kid in a trailer by his parents’ farm, where he worked too. And, yet, this death—the death of his wife—devastates him. She was his wife nonetheless. I also like the way the protagonist talks to his daughter, and the way he has a moment of shame because his groceries do not include soymilk. But, again, a central theme is a line in the story: “Here is my life.”
Oh, did I mention these stories mostly take place in Oregon? Which is refreshing, pun slightly intended, because most stories these days seem pretty East Coastish—even my own. Unless we’re talking Annie Proulx, but we’re not.
I’ll read more Benjamin Percy. I think they’re making a movie of his novel?
Let’s see. I bought their books after reading Richard Russo’s “Horseman,” Roy Kesey’s “Wait,” Nathan Englander’s “How We Avenged the Blums,” and William Gay’s, “Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?” Lorrie Moore has been pretty influential. Kyle Minor gave me a Flannery O’Connor epiphany with “A Day Meant to Do Less.” And I’m still in love with Tim O’Brien’s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED.
Sometimes I hold the stories up to my own fierce literary theories about the redemptive end (see my essay on “Lost,” which is out there somewhere). Sometimes I read stuff and just forget about it. But sometimes I read something and take notes.
Okay, let’s not call me “cynical.” Let’s use “eclectic” instead.
So I just finished Benjamin Percy’s REFRESH, REFRESH.
This is one of the good ones. I’m not sure it really meets my whole redemptive-end-standards, but these are good stories with meaning and resolution. They’re also fairly, hmm, masculine. I can tell a guy wrote them. I hope that’s okay to say. I know I don’t like when people say that I write for women (I don’t!)—but I’m okay if you say I write like a girl. These are stories written by a guy, though they’re not enmeshed in that Hemingway macho stuff. There is, however, a fair amount of hunting and fishing.
But, ultimately, they’re stories for men and women. Perhaps they deal with a universal concern. They ask, if you will, the secularized version of the question posed by theologian Francis Schaeffer, “How shall we then live?” Soldiers return home from Iraq. How shall we then live? Marriages sour. How shall we then live? A car crash kills. How shall we then live? A father abandons his family. How shall we then live?
I liked most of the stories, but my favorites were “The Caves of Oregon,” “Meltdown,” and “Crash.” “The Caves of Oregon” plays a little, maybe, with Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” (okay, I’m probably making this up)—but I like stories about marriages that contain the sweetness and the pitfalls of commitment. Good marriage stories are kinda rare. “Meltdown” reminded me a little of THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy, and a little of THE ROAD WARRIOR, the movie (Mel Gibson, circa my late childhood). But there were things in this story that weren’t in THE ROAD—and their absence in McCarthy always bugged me! This story had context! A reason for its apocalyptic reality! The protagonist had a history! That is serious cause for celebration! And then “Crash.” (Yeah, I have my own car crash story.) I liked this for a number of reasons. Part of it has to do with marriage again. The protagonist is destroyed over the death of his wife; however, it wasn’t a marriage or a life he dreamed about. He married the high school girlfriend because she was pregnant. He didn’t go out into the world to study international politics. He didn’t live in a big, beautiful house. He lived with his wife and kid in a trailer by his parents’ farm, where he worked too. And, yet, this death—the death of his wife—devastates him. She was his wife nonetheless. I also like the way the protagonist talks to his daughter, and the way he has a moment of shame because his groceries do not include soymilk. But, again, a central theme is a line in the story: “Here is my life.”
Oh, did I mention these stories mostly take place in Oregon? Which is refreshing, pun slightly intended, because most stories these days seem pretty East Coastish—even my own. Unless we’re talking Annie Proulx, but we’re not.
I’ll read more Benjamin Percy. I think they’re making a movie of his novel?
July 9, 2011
A huge disappointment. The title story (the first in the book) is worth reading, but I can't recommend any of the next three (which is as far as I got before I got frustrated and gave up on the book). Even the first story--which was published in The Paris Review and reprinted in BASS--doesn't hold up very well on a second read. The bad habits that undermine this story (and ruin the next three) all spring from Percy's unwillingness to credit the reader with intelligence: he loves an obvious symbol and can't leave it alone once he's thought of it; his characters are heavy-handed chunks of humanity whose outlines he keeps tracing and retracing lest we forget what they represent; and he can't resist language that prods the reader toward the theme (See, get it? Isn't that clever?). The effect is that of second-order "fiction," stories made up of existing story parts, and by the fourth story, I felt insulted.
March 21, 2008
Percy's stories are impeccable, possibly too impeccable. Nearly always beginning with darkness (a refrigerator dripping blood, a nuclear meltdown, two boys fighting) and never getting any brighter, Percy executes perfectly. Without fail, Percy finds ways to burrow deeper. The stories (all set in rural Oregon) seem almost classical to me (and it's maybe not surprising that I heard about this book via my ex-writing prof) to the point where there is little surprise when characters have heart attacks in the middle of ice storms, bears maul teenage girls, and a grandfather shows his grandson his severed foot in a bucket. But that doesn't mean there's not awe.
March 11, 2011
I picked this one up at work - salvaged from the discard pile (perhaps from Maria's old desk...). I had no expectations.
I am wowED. The writing is crisp, clear, descriptive and powerful. I'll comment more once I'm done.
I am wowED. The writing is crisp, clear, descriptive and powerful. I'll comment more once I'm done.
March 27, 2019
Birthday book #2/13 in 2019; "Boyhood" theme
Refresh, refresh
Some boys pass time by fighting each other to get strong, and to prepare themselves against bullies especially after being a victim of bullying at school. They really hurt each other too - hit the kidney and peed blood, hit the arm and can't lift it all week. I thought this admirable - find a solution to your problem. Their description of incapable men - "men who rarely shave and watched daytime tv in their once-white underpants. Men who lived in trailers and filled their shopping carts with Busch Light, summer sausage, Oreo cookies." I like these boys! These two boys are still in school but they go hunting with rifles, just the two of them. I find that impressive. I wonder if I'll feel comfortable letting my boy go hunting with a friend when he is high school? I suppose it depends on how he turns out - if he is trustworthy, careful, and is well-practiced in handling weapons. Anger consumes them both at the news of their Marine fathers' death and the way they took out their anger seems more violent than how I imagine girls would. Maybe in a sense it's better to be like a boy because girls tend to internalize things and drive ourselves crazy, while boys let the steam off and get it out of their system. Immediately afterwards some are able to function and make decisions again like wanting to make their dead fathers proud.
The Caves of Oregon
Kevin is a good man, and a good husband. He works hard, he tries really hard to understand his wife and keep the peace, and he understands her grief. Men get over sadness and disappointment so differently, and a good man will always be the rock for the woman to hold on to in her grief. I hope my boy will grow up to be good in all ways.
The Woods
Twelve: old enough to shoot a gunn young enough to fear the dark.
"Don't be a pantywaist." said his dad. - I'm going to use this phrase when I get the chance.
Sometimes you think you're teaching them a lesson, a skill, to take opportunity of a situation, or to be brave but it turns out traumatizing them and they end up hating the very thing you desired them to excel at, and they also hate you. Parenting is such a precarious position!
The Killing
"A boy ought to go fishing."
Yes, I think my girls and boy ought to go!
The rest of the stories are interesting. Some borderline horror, some just thrilling, while some are just stories and didn't really hit me with anything. All the stories were vividly descriptive, and I'm impressed with Percy's ability to detail everything especially the characters featured in each story, as they are very different from each other, as well as the seasons, or surroundings. No story is predictable, and no storyline is similar to the other. Great storyteller!
Refresh, refresh
Some boys pass time by fighting each other to get strong, and to prepare themselves against bullies especially after being a victim of bullying at school. They really hurt each other too - hit the kidney and peed blood, hit the arm and can't lift it all week. I thought this admirable - find a solution to your problem. Their description of incapable men - "men who rarely shave and watched daytime tv in their once-white underpants. Men who lived in trailers and filled their shopping carts with Busch Light, summer sausage, Oreo cookies." I like these boys! These two boys are still in school but they go hunting with rifles, just the two of them. I find that impressive. I wonder if I'll feel comfortable letting my boy go hunting with a friend when he is high school? I suppose it depends on how he turns out - if he is trustworthy, careful, and is well-practiced in handling weapons. Anger consumes them both at the news of their Marine fathers' death and the way they took out their anger seems more violent than how I imagine girls would. Maybe in a sense it's better to be like a boy because girls tend to internalize things and drive ourselves crazy, while boys let the steam off and get it out of their system. Immediately afterwards some are able to function and make decisions again like wanting to make their dead fathers proud.
The Caves of Oregon
Kevin is a good man, and a good husband. He works hard, he tries really hard to understand his wife and keep the peace, and he understands her grief. Men get over sadness and disappointment so differently, and a good man will always be the rock for the woman to hold on to in her grief. I hope my boy will grow up to be good in all ways.
The Woods
Twelve: old enough to shoot a gunn young enough to fear the dark.
"Don't be a pantywaist." said his dad. - I'm going to use this phrase when I get the chance.
Sometimes you think you're teaching them a lesson, a skill, to take opportunity of a situation, or to be brave but it turns out traumatizing them and they end up hating the very thing you desired them to excel at, and they also hate you. Parenting is such a precarious position!
The Killing
"A boy ought to go fishing."
Yes, I think my girls and boy ought to go!
The rest of the stories are interesting. Some borderline horror, some just thrilling, while some are just stories and didn't really hit me with anything. All the stories were vividly descriptive, and I'm impressed with Percy's ability to detail everything especially the characters featured in each story, as they are very different from each other, as well as the seasons, or surroundings. No story is predictable, and no storyline is similar to the other. Great storyteller!
September 12, 2023
this was a really gripping, well-written short story collection. there wasn't much stylistic variety; the stories all share the setting of rural Oregon, usually during the years of Dubya and the Iraq war, and a focus on a male protagonist struggling to some degree with his primal drives. but Benjamin Percy covers a lot of ground with that basic premise, delivering 10 distinct flavours of toxic masculinity.
the content is often ugly, with very sparse use of humour. most of the stories include at least one or two minor gut-punch sentences. you know the type, the ones that brutally recontextualize much of what you just read, and leave you dumbly staring at the page like a glitched robot. violence is as often emotional and mental as it is physical.
standout stories include The Caves in Oregon, the truly repulsive Whisper, and my personal favourite, The Faulty Builder. On the other hand, the opening story, which gives the book its name, is a thoroughly unpleasant read and (in my opinion) should be read after a few others, so one can get used to Percy's world before seeing it get quite this grotesque.
the content is often ugly, with very sparse use of humour. most of the stories include at least one or two minor gut-punch sentences. you know the type, the ones that brutally recontextualize much of what you just read, and leave you dumbly staring at the page like a glitched robot. violence is as often emotional and mental as it is physical.
standout stories include The Caves in Oregon, the truly repulsive Whisper, and my personal favourite, The Faulty Builder. On the other hand, the opening story, which gives the book its name, is a thoroughly unpleasant read and (in my opinion) should be read after a few others, so one can get used to Percy's world before seeing it get quite this grotesque.
January 15, 2025
I’d read the title short story of this collection before, so I was excited to read more of Percy’s stories about masculinity and growing up in its destructive shadow, and I wasn’t disappointed by the stories Percy laid out in this collection! I appreciated how each story had the same setting in Oregon and how each narrator remained a man. It made the collection feel very cohesive and I even think it allowed for some context, especially for stories appearing at the end of the collection. I would’ve given this 5 stars if it weren’t for “Whisper” while I can tell the author’s intention seems to be to disturb us with this, showing what the brain of a truly nasty man can be like, it was almost too disturbing and I couldn’t glimpse any other point that may have been intended to shine through.
My absolute favorites were “Somebody is Going to Have to Pay for This”, “The Caves in Oregon”, and “Crash”. Percy uses such specific, odd & gory descriptions/similes that paint a vivid picture of each scene and make it instantly memorable.
My absolute favorites were “Somebody is Going to Have to Pay for This”, “The Caves in Oregon”, and “Crash”. Percy uses such specific, odd & gory descriptions/similes that paint a vivid picture of each scene and make it instantly memorable.
June 6, 2023
It's about nature, violence, small towns, marriages that have gone stale, fathers, Iraq, and the seething quiet rage inside of man. The standout tale, "The Killing", places us in the shoe's of a grizzled and broken father out in the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest, driven to do what he feels he must.
These are not novel stories, but Percy trades narrative complexity for introspection, giving readers a deep look into the clockwork of his protagonist's minds. The prose is plain but vibrant. A kind of mater-of-fact approach that feels like it was written by someone with dirt under their fingernails. It's haunting, beautiful, sad and gorgeous all at once. You can see the straight line to Percy's work today.
Absolutely worth checking out.
These are not novel stories, but Percy trades narrative complexity for introspection, giving readers a deep look into the clockwork of his protagonist's minds. The prose is plain but vibrant. A kind of mater-of-fact approach that feels like it was written by someone with dirt under their fingernails. It's haunting, beautiful, sad and gorgeous all at once. You can see the straight line to Percy's work today.
Absolutely worth checking out.
August 21, 2023
I read this several years ago and gave it another go, since I'm now living in Central Oregon, where the stories are set. Percy's writing is excellent, but I hadn't remembered quite how dark and violent most of the pieces are. The title story, about two boys affected by their missing fathers (serving in Iraq) is excellent, but the violence is more intense than I remembered. There's also an excellent story about a couple living in a house a number of caves directly underneath them that is pretty horrifying and another very scary one about strange occurrences in the woods. These are not for the faint-hearted.
December 25, 2025
I didn't love all these stories but my God, the writing.
I first read Percy's stories many years ago in The Paris Review where they were published and they really stuck with me, enough that I got this book all these years later.
Set in and around Oregon these are mostly naturalistic (though some dip into horror and scifi) stories about men in crisis with a heavy emphasis on the consequences of the Iraq war on young men in the late 2000s.
Many great stories here but my faves were Refresh, Refresh and Meltdown, which features a young man navigating a Mad Max-esque post apocalyptic world.
Can't wait to read Percy's other short story collections.
I first read Percy's stories many years ago in The Paris Review where they were published and they really stuck with me, enough that I got this book all these years later.
Set in and around Oregon these are mostly naturalistic (though some dip into horror and scifi) stories about men in crisis with a heavy emphasis on the consequences of the Iraq war on young men in the late 2000s.
Many great stories here but my faves were Refresh, Refresh and Meltdown, which features a young man navigating a Mad Max-esque post apocalyptic world.
Can't wait to read Percy's other short story collections.
May 4, 2020
Many of the stories are amazing, including Refresh, Refresh; Whisper; The Faulty Builder. Each story has rich, full characters who want something that's hard to achieve. Percy is the master of scences, sensory details and compelling storylines. If I had any complaint, it would be that some of the stories seemed to long.
December 16, 2020
A look at two teenage boys, and how they cope with daily life after all the men of their small town, including their fathers, have been called to fight in the Irag war, when the reservist marine unit is activated. This contemporary tale of how war affects those who are left behind as their loved ones are sent off to fight and possible never return home.
May 28, 2017
Slight but powerful for the right reader, I think. 3 boys, friends in rural America, all with dads or family serving overseas. They digest their questions and feeling with backyard boxing. Tragedy strikes with a marine at the door.
August 19, 2018
The title story was one of the most masterful short stories I’ve ever read. The rest fell a little short. But I appreciated Percy’s bold, raw, vivid storytelling. And how all the stories taught me something - about hunting or rifles or bears or manhood or grief.
January 18, 2021
Good stories. Percy is an excellent prose stylist. Very deliberately concerned w/ masculinity and a certain kind of lifestyle. It's as much a collection of stories about Oregon as it is stories about war and male experiences.
December 12, 2017
Damn, dude. Paints a vivid picture of what it's like having your dad away at war in a modern age.
November 1, 2019
Review forthcoming.
October 9, 2020
I liked this collection of stories but they didn’t rise to the level of O’Conner, O’Brien or Klay.
February 28, 2023
Many of the stories were depressing and most of the endings were open-ended and unsatisfying. Good writing though
October 15, 2012
Taken individually, Benjamin Percy’s ability with the short story form is to be greatly admired, but as a short story collection his book of short, literary, blue-collar horror stories, Refresh, Refresh, has its flaws.
Benjamin Percy writes about the tormenting pull of assumed identities and destiny, veterans and violent future recruits, absent and otherwise bad fathers, infertility and failing relationships, and hunting, with a few rare glimmers of love, friendship, and redemption.
This collection contains some great material for a writer so young, far and away its best being the title story, a coming of age tale about war orphans growing into an embrace of moral ambiguity and hate. It is immediately followed by The Caves in Oregon, in which a married couple explores a cave beneath their home while struggling to become unlost in regards to a personal tragedy. The Killing and When the Bear Came are two more captivating stories, both simmering with parent-child relationships gone sour and exploding with bold reactions rendered in gruesome detail across rough emotional terrain.
There were a few others that were less effective and one I couldn't bring myself to finish. The Woods came off like a decent Stephen King short but left me wanting more from its abrupt, anticlimactic ending. I liked the protagonist from The Meltdown and found its setup thrilling in its encyclopedic world-building but too quickly it turned into a botched imitation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, complete with a ruined world, a child tagging along, a backyard bunker to find safety and supplies in, and violence against a flatbed truck-riding marauder. The story Whisper will make any reader’s skin crawl if they can stomach it out until the end, and I wish you all luck in doing so. Due to completely unsympathetic characters and a plot that literally drove into nowhere, I had to allow myself to skip the second half of The Faulty Builder and come back to it later or give up the book entirely.
These latter stories are easily eclipsed by the best in the collection, but the book does not exceed the sum of its parts. Consistent motifs of elk hunting, non-urban Oregon, fatherhood blunders, and death in the family appear in story after story, eventually giving the feeling that they are all various combinations on the same limited ingredients rather than stories that just all take place geographically near each other. The stories also seem to be arranged in descending order of most effective to least, leaving me to wonder if it was expected that readers might ignore the back half based on good memories from the front. With Percy’s best work being so much better than his mediocre stuff, it’s a wonder more stories weren’t left off in favor of a thinner book with more kick, less filler and therefore less repetition of quickly too-familiar elements.
If you like Thom Jones's story collection The Pugilist at Rest or Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, you'd probably enjoy this book.
Benjamin Percy writes about the tormenting pull of assumed identities and destiny, veterans and violent future recruits, absent and otherwise bad fathers, infertility and failing relationships, and hunting, with a few rare glimmers of love, friendship, and redemption.
This collection contains some great material for a writer so young, far and away its best being the title story, a coming of age tale about war orphans growing into an embrace of moral ambiguity and hate. It is immediately followed by The Caves in Oregon, in which a married couple explores a cave beneath their home while struggling to become unlost in regards to a personal tragedy. The Killing and When the Bear Came are two more captivating stories, both simmering with parent-child relationships gone sour and exploding with bold reactions rendered in gruesome detail across rough emotional terrain.
There were a few others that were less effective and one I couldn't bring myself to finish. The Woods came off like a decent Stephen King short but left me wanting more from its abrupt, anticlimactic ending. I liked the protagonist from The Meltdown and found its setup thrilling in its encyclopedic world-building but too quickly it turned into a botched imitation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, complete with a ruined world, a child tagging along, a backyard bunker to find safety and supplies in, and violence against a flatbed truck-riding marauder. The story Whisper will make any reader’s skin crawl if they can stomach it out until the end, and I wish you all luck in doing so. Due to completely unsympathetic characters and a plot that literally drove into nowhere, I had to allow myself to skip the second half of The Faulty Builder and come back to it later or give up the book entirely.
These latter stories are easily eclipsed by the best in the collection, but the book does not exceed the sum of its parts. Consistent motifs of elk hunting, non-urban Oregon, fatherhood blunders, and death in the family appear in story after story, eventually giving the feeling that they are all various combinations on the same limited ingredients rather than stories that just all take place geographically near each other. The stories also seem to be arranged in descending order of most effective to least, leaving me to wonder if it was expected that readers might ignore the back half based on good memories from the front. With Percy’s best work being so much better than his mediocre stuff, it’s a wonder more stories weren’t left off in favor of a thinner book with more kick, less filler and therefore less repetition of quickly too-familiar elements.
If you like Thom Jones's story collection The Pugilist at Rest or Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower, you'd probably enjoy this book.
October 10, 2011
Tumalo, Oregon is the American frontier of today- far different than the John Wayne, plus sized machismo, and tobacco-spitting Wild West of black and white cowboy movies.
Tumalo has many textures. Good and evil don’t fight each other in horseback showdowns; they are confusedly linked like a jelly fish’s tentacles. Pain and loss live on the surface of daily life.
Percy’s Tumalo is firstly a masculine world. A world of omnipresent blood, of knuckle-tearing and sledgehammer-swinging factory work, snot and dirt-filled backyard brawls, Budweiser’s consumed in front of nightly Wheel of Fortune episodes, and piles of animal bones.
This western and resourceful frontier brawniness, in all its masculinity, however, never ceases being real.
The turbocharged, big chested, Papa Hemingway manliness serves to merely color the inescapable pains and joy’s of everyday life: a father at war, a wife’s miscarriage, a father tormented with watching his daughter suffer through a destructive relationship.
The brawny, unshaven gruff, the stand-up freezers of hanging deer carcasses, the vultures, hunting dogs, and pools of deep red blood wouldn’t work, just wouldn’t work without the counterposed textures of human vulnerability and tenderness: the struggling marriage, an aging man feeling his mortality, a tyrannical and abusive husband, and father and son whom cannot find the words to pierce the silence of a car ride down a quiet country road.
The vulnerability and masculinity in “Refresh, Refresh” interplay in a polyphonic, brilliant way that is above all- authentic. These stories from Benjamin Percy represent life lived honestly, if not perfectly, and in unwavering recognition of the human struggles that befall, in some form, us all.
Take the interior, emotional world of the protagonist in “The Meltdown”. It is a sculpture in high relief, set against the backdrop of a nuclear and Chernobyl-like exterior landscape.
This grim setting along with the “numbness” of the Iraqi war veteran protagonist play off each other in a powerful way. The pure desolation of the radiation-filled landscape only draws the reader further and more immediately into the interior world of the story’s main character.
Percy, with prose that is as modern and authentically American as the new frontier world he evokes, as hardscrabble and raw as the landscape of Tumalo, and as resourceful and optimistic as the town’s most praiseworthy inhabitants, has created a collection of stories not to be overlooked.
Tumalo has many textures. Good and evil don’t fight each other in horseback showdowns; they are confusedly linked like a jelly fish’s tentacles. Pain and loss live on the surface of daily life.
Percy’s Tumalo is firstly a masculine world. A world of omnipresent blood, of knuckle-tearing and sledgehammer-swinging factory work, snot and dirt-filled backyard brawls, Budweiser’s consumed in front of nightly Wheel of Fortune episodes, and piles of animal bones.
This western and resourceful frontier brawniness, in all its masculinity, however, never ceases being real.
The turbocharged, big chested, Papa Hemingway manliness serves to merely color the inescapable pains and joy’s of everyday life: a father at war, a wife’s miscarriage, a father tormented with watching his daughter suffer through a destructive relationship.
The brawny, unshaven gruff, the stand-up freezers of hanging deer carcasses, the vultures, hunting dogs, and pools of deep red blood wouldn’t work, just wouldn’t work without the counterposed textures of human vulnerability and tenderness: the struggling marriage, an aging man feeling his mortality, a tyrannical and abusive husband, and father and son whom cannot find the words to pierce the silence of a car ride down a quiet country road.
The vulnerability and masculinity in “Refresh, Refresh” interplay in a polyphonic, brilliant way that is above all- authentic. These stories from Benjamin Percy represent life lived honestly, if not perfectly, and in unwavering recognition of the human struggles that befall, in some form, us all.
Take the interior, emotional world of the protagonist in “The Meltdown”. It is a sculpture in high relief, set against the backdrop of a nuclear and Chernobyl-like exterior landscape.
This grim setting along with the “numbness” of the Iraqi war veteran protagonist play off each other in a powerful way. The pure desolation of the radiation-filled landscape only draws the reader further and more immediately into the interior world of the story’s main character.
Percy, with prose that is as modern and authentically American as the new frontier world he evokes, as hardscrabble and raw as the landscape of Tumalo, and as resourceful and optimistic as the town’s most praiseworthy inhabitants, has created a collection of stories not to be overlooked.
October 5, 2010
Everything I read in my running magazines says that eastern Oregon, especially around Bend, is a great place to live especially for trail runners. After reading Refresh, Refresh I'm not sure that I would want to go for a run in eastern Oregon, much less on the trails there. Mr. Percy portrays a world east of the Cascades where bad things happen to good people, to bad people, but mostly to very ordinary people. At least on the first impression. Conflict is necessary for any story. What Percy does though isn't just to lift the rotting log a bit for us to peek underneath, he rolls it over so we can truly contemplate the underside of our nature. His stories are about ordinary people who have an issue, OK, maybe issues, in their lives. But Percy pushes it just a little further. He says, "OK, we've got this situation, how can we make it just a bit more interesting, a touch worse?" The people in his stories don't have a glass that's half full, their glass either has sour milk in it or has tipped over and the milk has run all over and ruined the document that was going to turn their life around.
We've all hear the admonition to writers, "Show, don't tell." Well, Percy doesn't tell you what it's like to be a young widower whose wife was killed in a car accident in the story "Crash." He shows you. He puts you along side the husband and you witness the enormity of his pain and loss.
Percy's stories are well told and the characters tightly drawn. For instance, there is only minimal physical description of characters, Percy draws them with their behavior and setting. The only description of Becca, the woman in "The Caves in Oregon" consists of: "A long brown ponytail curls down her spine like an upside-down question mark." and "It was her honey-colored hair that first caught his attention." All the rest of the description of her is her behavior but I can picture her perfectly.
The people in Percy's stories are ordinary people dealing with issues and situations that happen to lots of people every day. The difference is that he lets us watch them, on a intimate level, deal with their problems, their lives. We watch fascinated with what is happening while we whisper to ourselves, "Glad I'm not there."
The title story, "Refresh, Refresh" was included in the 2006 edition of Best American Short Stories.
We've all hear the admonition to writers, "Show, don't tell." Well, Percy doesn't tell you what it's like to be a young widower whose wife was killed in a car accident in the story "Crash." He shows you. He puts you along side the husband and you witness the enormity of his pain and loss.
Percy's stories are well told and the characters tightly drawn. For instance, there is only minimal physical description of characters, Percy draws them with their behavior and setting. The only description of Becca, the woman in "The Caves in Oregon" consists of: "A long brown ponytail curls down her spine like an upside-down question mark." and "It was her honey-colored hair that first caught his attention." All the rest of the description of her is her behavior but I can picture her perfectly.
The people in Percy's stories are ordinary people dealing with issues and situations that happen to lots of people every day. The difference is that he lets us watch them, on a intimate level, deal with their problems, their lives. We watch fascinated with what is happening while we whisper to ourselves, "Glad I'm not there."
The title story, "Refresh, Refresh" was included in the 2006 edition of Best American Short Stories.
May 20, 2018
The title story of the collection in the most famous and certainly interesting. In Refresh, Refresh Ben Percy explores two abandoned two young men developing violent predilections. The young adults are trying to feel their way into adulthood without the advice and guidance of the their fathers. The misguided energy of the two friends leads them to embrace the vicious aspects of American culture as they try to assert themselves as men. The young men develop with no immediate adult governance and leads to unrestrained, self-destructive choices. The text omits specific aspects of the story which forces the reader to construct the details. The scant descriptions of the physical appearance of the narrator combine with missing features to require an active reader. The transitions in the piece are swift, the scene and setting, usually through a shift in time, are changed by one or two words leading into a paragraph. What strikes me most forcibly in the story a striking view of the sort of lives young adults live outside of school.
Overall, the collection is focused upon the gaps in modern life. The characters are hollowed out, by one thing or another, and are searching for comfort in their lives. The stories are strong. The Meltdown is a particularly interesting story, but I'm a sucker for the dystopic future scenarios. The are echoes of the stories within Mr. Percy's novel and the suspense isn't as drawn out as it is with The Wilding, but these blips don't even slow the pace of stories.
p.34 "Doctors don't know anything...How can they have the answers when answers are always changing."
p.64 "He prefers to hunt with a handgun or bow, as it requires marksmanship, the ability to stalk within close range. He thinks it only fair."
p.69 "But mostly her memory is like a tombstone whose description has become vague from lichen and frost, a half-remembered someone he refuses to mourn."
p.143 "In the moment before it opened, before Jackie stared at him wonderingly, he felt an overwhelming sadness, like he had lost something-something vital and substantial-his life...all the possibilities of what-could-have-been scattering like glass across the floor, like bones inside his brother's body, something that could not be reassembled."
Overall, the collection is focused upon the gaps in modern life. The characters are hollowed out, by one thing or another, and are searching for comfort in their lives. The stories are strong. The Meltdown is a particularly interesting story, but I'm a sucker for the dystopic future scenarios. The are echoes of the stories within Mr. Percy's novel and the suspense isn't as drawn out as it is with The Wilding, but these blips don't even slow the pace of stories.
p.34 "Doctors don't know anything...How can they have the answers when answers are always changing."
p.64 "He prefers to hunt with a handgun or bow, as it requires marksmanship, the ability to stalk within close range. He thinks it only fair."
p.69 "But mostly her memory is like a tombstone whose description has become vague from lichen and frost, a half-remembered someone he refuses to mourn."
p.143 "In the moment before it opened, before Jackie stared at him wonderingly, he felt an overwhelming sadness, like he had lost something-something vital and substantial-his life...all the possibilities of what-could-have-been scattering like glass across the floor, like bones inside his brother's body, something that could not be reassembled."
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