True to its name, Burning Down My Father’s House, comes at you like a house on fire. Michael Gills’s fourth collection of short fiction continues the saga of Joey Harvell, who’s from a people prone to impromptu fistfights on the sides of southern highways, where they drive semis hauling dead whales floating in beds of formaldehyde, after all, “this was the Dixie Circuit–it was nothing for a Peterbilt to pull off the interstate with a six-hundred-pound rat, two-headed goats or Donkey Woman nursing horsey-faced twins.” Murderous and grace-infused, these stories incinerate the family trials and tribulations that collect and go on collecting until they stack floor to ceiling under the carports of our lives. What’s left after the great conflagration is a matter of the heart, how we love, even when it’s impossible.
