Book Review:

Raymond Carver's brand of story telling is alive and well in Wells Tower's book of stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. Sure, you can quibble about minimalism and metaphor, but I was reminded of no one so much as Carver in reading Tower's stories.

The characters are everyday sorts of folks who find themselves in everyday sorts of problems, even when they run away from home and join the circus ("On the Show") or they join a band of marauding Vikings to sack a monastery ("Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned"). These are folks who are rundown and weary with their lot in life and desperately seeking answers in all the wrong places because these places are the only ones they know to seek answers in.

Maybe my favorite among the nine stories contained in the book is "Retreat," a story about two brothers, one of whom, Matthew, is doomed like Sisyphus to fail after every success. He is our story teller in this piece, and at the end, he manages to make a magnificent shot on a hunting trip with his brother of an moose. The animal will provide him with enough meat for a year. He and his brother and one other character work all afternoon to muscle the animal back to their hunting cabin, where they begin to butcher it, but while Matthew is cooking the three of them some steaks carved from the animal, the other two realize the meat has been spoiled, probably due to it being diseased.

All of that work for nothing, and how does Matthew respond to that. Like a good many other people I've known. But you'll have to read the story to find out.

This review focuses on plot and character, but the real magic in story telling comes from the voice of the narrator. The opening story, "The Brown Coast," beings with

Bob Munroe woke up on his face. His jaw hurt and morning birds were yelling and there was real discmfort in his underpants. He'd come in late, his spine throbbing from the bus ride down, and he had stretched out on the floor with a late dinner of two bricks of saltines. Now cracker bits were all over him—under his bare chest, stuck in the sweaty creases of his elbows and his neck, and the biggest and worst of them he could feel lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead somebody had shot in there.

Now who wouldn't want to read on after that opening?