“Means’s fictional worlds are ominous, pre-apocalyptic, the hiss after a match is struck but before it ignites. A typical hillside is, ‘silent and gritty, with condoms curled like snakeskins in the weeds, and the ash craters, and the used needles, glinting in the moonlight.’ He’s a biographer of violence, interested in how blunt force trauma shapes human development as surely as technology or political elections—characters are beaten, shot, stabbed, drowned, tortured, crucified, and spontaneously combusted.”
Brian Beglin reviews David Means’s newest collection of short stories, The Spot.
