What Salmon Know

Rating:
Summary: Occasionally great, sometimes not so great
Review: Like most collections of short stories, Reid's What Salmon Know runs the gamut in quality. His ten stories here all have male protagonists, many of whom live in Alaska and work with their hands, contemptuous of the tourists who flock to Alaska in the summer and shoot anything that moves or excitedly point at the grizzly bears from their seat on the motor coach.
I really liked some of the latter stories, including "No Strings Attached", about a working class guy who is picked up in a grocery store by a beautiful girl who knows him, and who has an unusual living arrangement with her husband. "Laura Borealis" was another good one, named after a dancer who befriends our hero as he helps build a lodge for a wealthy divorced Texan who has escaped to Alaska following a nasty divorce. The Texan hires two carpenters, including our narrator and another guy with a reputation as having the foulest smelling dog in the state, from his habit of napping with his feet under the dog.
Some stories don't work so well, such as the last tale called "Random Beatings and You", which uses a bizarre present tense narration style that served no purpose. The title story, "What Salmon Know", reminded me of Reid's powerful novel Midnight Sun, in which two characters head up to a lodge in Alaska for some salmon fishing and encounter some brutal, clueless military guys who catch and then filet a live fish. Fans of tough guy short stories like Tom Franklin's Poachers and Larry Brown's Big Bad Love will undoubtedly find something here they like, as well as an occasional clunker.

Rating:
Summary: Literature to get lit by.
Review: Man I od'd on baseball quite a while back but the "All That Good Stuff" story is as funny a sports piece as I've ever read. Worth the price of the book alone. Has at least a half dozen laugh out loud lines describing the characters' actions/traits. Get it.

Rating:
Summary: Flat characters ruin these stories
Review: This was my first introduction to Elwood Reid. Characters remian flat and speak if addressing a television audience. What at first is mildly annoying (I was intrigued by the situations many of the characters find themselves in), slowly becomes exceedlying grating as one is left to wonder if Reid is lacking in both ear and heart. I've not read a recent collection of stories that stuck me as so cookie-cutter and cliched. I find the publisher's "blue collar man-in-pain" marketing offensive and Reid's story telling certainly not up to the task.