Knockemstiff Donald Ray Pollock Harvill Secker, 224pp, £15.99

Donald Ray Pollock's graphic, entertaining first book is a collection of short stories based on various fictional inhabitants of the small town of Knockemstiff, Ohio. His characters lead shockingly depraved lives, which they are unable to escape: "I've lived here all my life, like a toadstool stuck to a rotten log," says the downtrodden narrator of the title story. It's a fittingly unappealing image, and Pollock is always ready to elicit disgust in the reader as he presents a medley of drug addicts, misfits, criminals and alcoholics. In the frightening "Dynamite Hole", a draft-dodger comes across a brother and sister having sex in a river, rapes the girl and then clubs them both to death, stuffing the bodies beneath the riverbank; in "Rainy Sunday", a woman with a mentally disabled husband seduces drunk men for her obese aunt to drug and take home with her.

The stories range in time from the Second World War to the present day, though very little appears to change from generation to generation in Knockemstiff; indeed, one of the salient, more depressing motifs of the book is that of the monstrous father raising a son in his own likeness. "My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch drive-in when I was seven years old," begins the first story, "Real Life", in which an abusive, alcoholic father goads his son into assaulting another boy twice his size at an outdoor screening of Godzilla. In an effective, if overwrought, final image, the son finds himself licking the other boy's blood off his knuckles in bed at night: "I wanted more. I would always want more."

More follows. In "Discipline", an obsessive bodybuilder is desperate for his son to become Mr South Ohio and forces him to lead an almost inhuman lifestyle: "For breakfast, he got a spoon of oatmeal; for dinner, a sliver of baked fish. At night, I gave him wooden clothes hangers to chew on . . . 'South Ohio!' I screamed every time he puked." The horrific, darkly comical tone is typical of Pollock's writing. In the outstanding "Lard", young Duane is harangued by his father for being a sissy: "'I shit you not, boy,' [his father] bragged, settling back on his skinny haunches and wiping sweat from his dirt-streaked brow, 'one time I fucked a mud-dauber's nest I was so goddamn horny.'" But, in a moving ending, Duane comes good; here, uncommonly in Knockemstiff, is a likeable character.

In the best of these stories, the sordidness of the characters' lives is balanced by a tragic self-awareness. They are all in the "holler" (the southern Appalachian pronunciation of "hollow"), but some of them can see the stars.

Most of the characters are, nonetheless, desperately incapable of effecting personal change. In "Bactine" a man finds himself in a Crispie Creme store at 3am trying to refuse the offer of another high. The story ends with the depressing reali sation that: "Because of who we were, I already knew what we would do. In a few minutes, Jimmy and I would leave this place and go find somewhere to park his filthy car. He would fill up the plastic bag again with Bactine, and I would sit and listen to him suck the cold fog down into his lungs . . . If he were lucky tonight, maybe he would see something that he hadn't seen before. And then it would be my turn."

Such moments of bleak lyricism lift stories that would otherwise consist of mere grotesquerie. But generally Pollock's writing is lean and unflinching. His economical prose excels in its lurid (and often scatological) detail, and his physical descriptions are superb. The book is laced with dry, black humour. An addict notices that "Will work for dope" has been written in the grime of a launderette window: "Del turned away, satisfied that he would never get that bad."

Pollock grew up in Knockemstiff, and worked at a paper mill nearby for more than 30 years before leaving to become a writer (though he is quick, in his acknowledgements, to distance his own experiences from the fictional universe he creates). Like Chuck Palahniuk, to whom he will inevitably be compared, he tries too hard to shock at times, covering one character unnecessarily with excrement. "Hair's Fate", in which a young boy puts on a blonde wig for a fat cowboy, also strikes a false note. There is an element of puerility hanging over the worst stories. Yet Pollock is a better writer than Palahniuk, with far more depth. Another immediate reference point is Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, with its similar structure and focus on stunted Midwestern lives - Anderson's famous "gnarled apples" to Pollock's toadstools. Pollock's characters, however, are more visibly grotesque, distorted both physically and psychically, and his style is far from allusive. His book is worth reading if you can stomach it.

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