Rust and Bone: Stories

Thom Jones

“The landscape of Rust and Bone is a war zone. With each story, the author digs both feet into the canvas and slings forth a blizzard of body blows that will knock you on your ass. When it comes to raw power, Davidson is truly a force to be reckoned with.”

Peter Straub

“In prose so clean it has been stripped down to the bone, Craig Davidson gives us the demimonde of dogfights, bar brawls, and washed-up boxers that Hemingway first brought into our literature. . . . Davidson . . . is a writer of immense power and surprising, accurate insights.”

Chuck Palahnuik

“Davidson . . . smudges the line between comedy and horror, cruelty and mercy. His remarkable stories are challenging and upsetting. . . . Don’t look for comfort here.”

Lizzie Skurnick

… while the stories often end in a melodramatic flourish, they begin with elegant economy. And though Davidson's attempts at tough talk are more "Deadwood" than Eastwood, an ironic joviality sometimes rises to the surface.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

A strong stomach, an open mind and a morbid sense of humor are essential to enjoying Davidson's accomplished, macabre first collection. Calamity lurks around every corner, these stories suggest, and you never know when fate will smite you-only that it will. Davidson catapults his characters (sex addicts, fighters, gamblers and drinkers) into ingeniously grim situations that test their will. In "Rocket Ride," a young man who loses his leg to the orca he performs with in a marine park show tries to rebuild his life, in part by attending meetings of the Unlimbited Potential support group, which is full of substance-abusing amputees who wonder if karma's to blame for their plights. In the gruesome "A Mean Utility," a normal-seeming couple-an ad exec and his wife, a nurse-breed and fight vicious dogs, while in the sad "On Sleepless Roads," a repo man leaves one night's job not with the camper he was supposed to reclaim, but with the destitute man's hamster and guinea pig, which he brings home to his disabled wife. Davidson, 30, is a fine young writer with a keen sense of the absurd and a bracing, biting wit, but his focus on gore may keep many readers from appreciating his obvious talent. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Davidson's forceful debut collection arrives like a jab to the jaw from one of his colorful characters. Sometimes masochistic, always muscled in the diction of the men who people them, the stories are impossible to ignore. Davidson brings us hard men-alcoholic fathers, sex-addicted porn stars, boxers, a repo man, a magician who deserts his two children-without patronizing them or their extreme conditions. He is as adept at the humorous interplay of personality in a sex addicts anonymous meeting (in "Friction") as he is in describing a vicious dogfight (in the excellent "A Mean Utility"). There are also quiet moments of grace, particularly in "An Apprentice's Guide to Modern Magic" and "On Sleepless Roads." Even when Davidson pushes the limits of what a reader can stomach, he never loses our attention or our empathy. Recommended as a young writer to watch.-Prudence Peiffer, Cambridge, MA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Stories of blood, guts, dog-fighting and sex addiction. Opening with a story about a broken-handed ex-prizefighter who watches his nephew fall through thin ice, and moving into a story about an alcoholic father who puts all his hopes on an estranged son's basketball game, Davidson's debut collection engages the Hemingway-esque tradition of terse prose describing toughened men who suffer while hiding their scars. The characters, wounded, and often wounding others and themselves, rarely seem to get what they want. Often they seem to frustrate their own ambitions: A man who loses his leg to a shark holes up, masturbates and then tries and fails to find love with a pretty young woman who has lost her arms. The dog-fighter turns out not to be able to have children with his wife, and in a midnight frenzy throws himself to his own dogs. The sex addict remains terminally addicted, imagining walls of genitals, attending orgies, unsure he can love even his own child. In the midst of these uncomfortable stories lurk certain fragmentary hopes, and a few reflective insights. At one point, the battered prizefighter claims: "Reach a certain experience level, you don't fight without reason. You've seen to many boxers hurt, killed even, to treat matches as dick-swinging contests." Nevertheless, these characters seem always to be fighting, swinging dicks and plowing ahead, hurt and hurting. Thick with bleak characters and thin on redemption, Davidson moves from one unsavory battered character to another. The relentless, unforgiving nature of these difficult worlds makes for heavy reading.