The book review magazine BookPage has just reviewed Gerald Duff’s new short story collection Fire Ants. Reviewer Harvey Freedenberg calls Fire Ants a “stimulating collection.” From the review:
Calling a short story writer a “Southern writer” inevitably conjures up images of giants like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. While Gerald Duff hasn’t reached that eminence, his collection Fire Ants is a fine addition to the genre.
Like most Southern storytellers, Duff is noteworthy for his focus on some of the more distinctive personalities who inhabit the territory below the Mason-Dixon Line. In “The Angler’s Paradise Fish-Cabin Dance of Love,” for example, a middle-aged oil worker kidnaps a teenager and transports her to a fishing cabin on the Texas Gulf Coast merely to watch her perform her cheerleading routine. “A Perfect Man” shifts the scene to Tennessee, where a mother desperate to free her son from jail after he’s been wrongly arrested for robbing a convenience store turns to the only source she can think of to help her make bail—her old lover. And in the collection’s title story Duff offers the eerie tale of an aging woman who re-enacts the end of a failed love affair in grisly fashion.
Read more BookPage reviews at their website.
Fire Ants is available directly from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.