10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Review: ‘The Continental Divide,' by Bob Johnson
THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE: Stories, by Bob Johnson
'The Continental Divide,' Bob Johnson's debut collection of 14 stories, begins with an epigraph from Jeremiah: 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?'
Epigraphs can be forgotten, if read at all, but this one continued to resonate after the tour de force title story that opens the book. As one potent story segued into another, alternative epigraphs started occurring to me. From Blake: 'Some are Born to sweet delight/Some are Born to Endless Night.' Johnson's stories dwell in the latter. From Flannery O'Connor: 'She would of been a good woman … if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.' That iconic story, 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,' ends with the kind of violence that is a go-to in several of Johnson's stories. Think Flannery O'Connor meets Quentin Tarantino.
There's an entertaining cinematic quality to these narratives. Several generate physical action that, besides wickedness, is driven by rage — fights, accidents, assaults, pederasty, filicide, matricide. Johnson's way with action and dialogue is skillful enough to be a stylistic signature. It's taut, visceral, and yet doesn't cross (as Hollywood can) into carnography.
But then his invention on several levels, including language, could be singled out. Take similes: 'He went to pull her close again but felt a rumble off her skin, like when a cat has had enough petting and is thinking of biting you.' Or: 'His eyes look like somebody blew matches out in them.'
There's a short-story axiom: Begin in medias res. These stories open already wound tight, demanding release. Characterization doesn't necessarily account for the situations his protagonists are caught in; their situations often define them. A sense of the inevitable fuels the stories' momentum.
'Plucked From the Lame and Afflicted,' a story about a teenage boy whose father has recently died, begins: 'There was only one vacancy, a room with a double bed, when Nelson and Pastor Snow checked into the motel.' Whatever you're thinking may happen next, it ends up being still more grotesque. A story with a title like 'Please, Mister, Please' needs only to begin, 'Fulkerson was nearly upon the car when he saw it,' to launch a Hitchcockian, macabre tale about a loan officer who stalks the night highways of Indiana.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
