Book Review: ‘The Continental Divide,’ by Bob Johnson

There’s a short-story axiom: Begin in medias res. These stories open already wound tight, demanding release. Characterization doesn’t necessarily account for the situations his protagonists are caught in; their situations often define them. A sense of the inevitable fuels the stories’ momentum.

“Plucked From the Lame and Afflicted,” a story about a teenage boy whose father has recently died, begins: “There was only one vacancy, a room with a double bed, when Nelson and Pastor Snow checked into the motel.” Whatever you’re thinking may happen next, it ends up being still more grotesque. A story with a title like “Please, Mister, Please” needs only to begin, “Fulkerson was nearly upon the car when he saw it,” to launch a Hitchcockian, macabre tale about a loan officer who stalks the night highways of Indiana.

There’s a subgenre of story collections linked by place that are more than the sum of their parts: Joyce’s “Dubliners” and Sherwood Anderson’s seminal “Winesburg, Ohio” are among the famous ones. Like “Winesburg,” Johnson’s book is set in a fictional Midwestern town. One-stoplight Mount Moriah, Ind., is named for the mountain in Genesis where Abraham bound Isaac for sacrifice, inspiring the thread of conflicts between parents and children through these stories.

Published in 1919, “Winesburg” still reads like a correction to American hypocrisy. Rather than community, there’s betrayal, repression and isolation founded in secrets that distort its citizens’ inner lives. Johnson’s book reads not like an imitation of Anderson, but as a fellow traveler. Secrets and betrayals remain prominent, although interiority is less integral than it is in “Winesburg.” In Johnson’s Indiana, psychic pain manifests as physical violence, while wickedness assumes the shape of a psychopathic lack of empathy.

Johnson’s inventive, assured writing delivers what one hopes for in a first book, pages that breathe with life, and the introduction to a writer who has absorbed the echoes of iconic storytellers, but whose already identifiable voice is his own.