A s someone with plenty of eclectic fiction on his bookshelves, I admit there’s much to be said for authors who attempt true characters from their own sense of the commonplace—to most of us, perhaps, lives spent in exhausted locales we would pass without any generous contemplation—yet manage to subvert those stereotypes tempted, even expected. Before gleaning the stories of Breaking it Down, most set in bucolic portions of Pennsylvania, readers can already see the routine dilemma coming, of being caught between cliché and faithfulness. Yet Rusty Barnes skillfully turns this problem towards very satisfying ends. He offers the humorous, desperate and isolating in his rural individuals that reveal greater interest in them than just regionalism, without pulling back from either their emotional faults or the seamy little realities they invite.

It is men occupying center stage in this collection, and Barnes does not take the easy way out characterizing them through economic, social depression: here are men, simple and complex, caught at the intersection of passion and their failure to act when needed. Or asked to. Some are filled with muted primal rage from stark, indifferent living, such as “Certitude” where a father mismanaging his home withdraws into untamed turmoil while his wife stands aside helpless, “as women know things about their husbands that they can never touch or affect,” only to wonder about what has really pulled him from the brink if not her. Others find their tenuous relationship with the inner animal manifesting itself in outward form, most notably in “Thunder & Putsy,” as a hunter tries consoling himself after grievously wounding his companion dog by accident, then being unable to put it down and fulfill his role. Those who do achieve their peace, however, are the ones mired in it. They love their women in vain, pick up the pieces of separation, but cannot move on. They are not so much trapped as they are immobile from self-deceit as though by instinct. And there are few answers for them, no apologies given, thankfully.

Barnes’ application of the flash form to many of these narratives strikes the right balance with his subject. Paragraph-story aficionados will appreciate “Witness” navigating a muddled Prom Night moment within a haze of B-grade horror flicks and adolescent futility before the spiritual; they will also cringe swiftly at watching the young woman in “Pretty” get the upper hand, so to speak, with her S/M-obsessed boyfriend, and console themselves with the sole pastoral time-out of “Beamer’s Opera” (a Pennsylvania dairy farmer out there, according to Barnes, who has Verdi working his interior soundtrack). For the frequent rough spots encountered, these sleek, fine-tuned works find their mark without resorting to interminable durations of having to drive at a snail’s pace past all the abandoned, ramshackle farmhouses along the way.

—forrest roth