A few lines I liked so far:
From "The Brown Coast" (I loved this story. I loved this story SO much in fact, I was angry it was over and didn't want to read the next one):
Right then the sound of metal on metal rose in the lane, along with a man's voice raised in rage. "Son of a bitch!" The voice belonged to a man bent down half-vanished under the hood of a Pontiac. "Aw, God fuck a milk cow!" The white-haired women turned pursed faces at the angry man. The golf cart whined and moved faster but not much.
Derrick came back into the living room. "Gotta take a ride over the bridge," he said. "Need to pull something out of a horse's pussy."
"What king of a thing?" Bob asked.
"A baby horse, I hope."
I really love the economy of emotion that Tower can deliver like in this sequence where Bob calls his wife, who kicked him out when his downward spiral led to him losing his job and cheating on her. His uncle sends him to fix up a cabin that used to belong to Bob's father and now his uncle. Imagine Bob's surprise when he calls his estranged wife and his uncle answers the phone:
"Well, how is it?" [Vicky asks.]
"Oh, real great," Bob said. "I struck oil in the yard. It's all champagne and gold toilets down here. I got people on call to put grapes in my mouth. But, anyway, I've enjoyed it about all I can. I'm getting ready to get ready to come on back."
"Huh," she said, "We have to talk about some things."
....
She said she did not like being without him, but that, though she tried hard to, she could not think of a reason to take him back right now. In a calm, lawyerly style, she detailed a long catalogue of Bob's shortcomings. From the sound of it, she had everything written down with dates and witnesses and the worst parts underlined. Bob listened to all of this and he felt himself get cold. He watched a mouse walk out from behind the soda machine. It was eating a coupon.
"Why don't you tell me about what Randall's doing on my property," he said. "Why don't we talk about something like that?"
"How about let's talk about nothing," she said. "I'm a happier person when I forget who you are."
Bob sighed and went into a fumbling half-hearted apology, but Vicky wouldn't answer, and he suspected she was holding the phone away from her face, as he'd seen her do when her mother called.
Bob becomes obsessed with fishing in the tidal pools and putting his finds in an aquarium. His neighbor Claire brings him a sea slug (Bob says it looks like "the turd of someone who'd been eating rubies.") It's poisonous and it kills all his fish. Her husband Derrick says they should kill it, after fussing at Claire for being a dumbass:
But Bob felt a kind of kinship with the slug. Had he been born a sea creature, he doubted God would have robed him in blue and yellow fins like the splendid dead fish at his feet, or put him in the body of a shark or barracuda or any of those exquisite destroyers. No, he'd probably have been family to this sea cucumber, built in the image of sewage and cursed with a chemical belch that ruined every lovely thing that drifted near.
From "Retreat" about an estranged pair of brothers attempting to bond on a hunting trip. Matthew, the narrator, is a real estate speculator down on his luck and living in a cabin in the Maine woods next door to an older man named George. It soon becomes apparent to Matthew that George likes his brother Stephen better than him. He then tries to get his brother to invest in the land as a hunting retreat for middle-aged suburban men, which George doesn't like. At all:
"And for another thing, I didn't move back here to get among a bunch of swinging dicks."
"No offense, George, but it's not your land we're talking about."
"I know that Matthew," George said. "What I'm saying is, you carve this hill up and sell it out to a bunch of cocksuckers from Boston, I'd say the chance is pretty good that some night in the off-season, I'd get a few too many beers in me and I'd get it in my head to come around with a few gallons of kerosene."
And here a brief moment of brotherly bonding between Matthew and Stephen. Any happiness in these stories is guaranteed to be transitory:
"I'm just fucking tired, Matty. I've been pushing for twenty years. I work so goddamned hard, and what have I got? I filled out this dating thing on the computer a few weeks ago. One thing they ask you is, 'If you were an animal, what would you be?' I wrote, 'A bumblebee trying to fuck a marble.' It's true. Just grinding away at this goddamned thing that never gives back. Pointless."
Some details on Stephen's life where he makes his living as a failed musician/music therapist:
When no orchestras called him with commissions, he had an artistic crackup, exiled himself to Eugene, Oregon, to buff his oeuvre and eke out a living teaching the mentally substandard to achieve sanity by blowing on harmonicas. When I drove down to see him two years ago after a conference in Seattle, I found him living above a candle store in a dingy apartment that he shared with a dying collie. The animal had lost the ability to urinate, so Stephen was always having to lug her downstairs to the grassy verge beside the sidewalk. There, he'd stand astride the poor animal and manually void its bladder via a Heimlich technique horrible to witness. You hated to see your last blood relation engaged in something like that. I told Stephen that from a business standpoint, the smart thing would be to put the dog down. This caused an ugly argument, but really, it seemed to me that someone regularly seen by the roadside hand -juicing a half-dead dog was not the man you'd flock to for lessons on how to be less out-of-your-mind.
In "Executors of Important Energies", a man contemplates the senility of his father who has always been distant and the hot young 21 year old wife he brought home when the narrator was a teen:
I'd had a hard crush on her, and in some dim way, I was sure that my father was only with her temporarily, that he planned to turn her over to me someday. The particulars weren't absolutely clear, but I had a hunch that somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, he was going to take me out to a desert overlook where the sun was going down and announce that he was giving Lucy to me, along with his Mustang fastback, along with some Schlitz, and maybe a cassette tape that was nothing but "Night Moves" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.....Somewhere in there, I stopped dreaming of Lucy, the fastback, the alleys and the trusty woods.
In "Wild America", which is I think the only story narrated by a female character, two teenaged cousins in what appear to be the 80's hang out one summer. It reminded me of vividly of that time in my youth when I began to see clearly I had little to nothing in common with my family and we were summertime BFF's no longer. Here the early blooming cousin Maya is telling Jacey about her new love interest, a 35 year old man (Maya is 15 and, alas, this is the pre-To Catch a Predator era):
"He just unlocks these rooms inside me," Maya was saying. "It's like he knows things about me that I don't even know myself."
In private revulsion, Jacey clenched her teeth so that an upper canine screeched against a lower. "God, well have you, I mean did you-all..." Jacey could not find a term appropriate for when a young girl is groaned on by a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant of the arts.
"Have we been lovers?"
Been lovers-the eyeteeth screeched again. Who said that? It called up an image of those two at it beneath a flowering arbor while swans watched.The title story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned", is about a Viking raid. On the surface, that is. It's funny to read so soon after The Last Kingdom. I liked the final paragraph which gets to the heart of things:
...after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hate those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It's crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing towards your home.
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