Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

Praise for

Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work

“In this fine story collection, the inhabitants of Vaughn, Maine are stalked not by Stephen King horror but by intimate afflictions of blood, accident, and history. Yet their stories are too vivid to be entirely bleak. Maine's woods and rivers, its changing light, are the beautifully rendered constants in a harsh, even malevolent, world.”

               
—Boston Globe

“
Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work
links gem-cut stories of troubled youths, alcoholics, illicit romances, the burden of inheritance, and the bane of class, all set in the dense upper reaches of Maine, and delivers them with hope, heart, and quiet humor.”

               
—Elle

“The fact that Brown's stories read like allegories makes them no less surprising; what is most original about them is, in fact, their sincerity. . . . Imagine
The Virgin Suicides
within an ethical framework. These are stories that truly have some weight to them.”

               
—Bookforum

“There's an unnerving, hazy human darkness that Jason Brown explores so well in these stories, all set around a small Maine town full of weary, complicated souls. Often Brown fixates on those just entering adulthood, an age when the twin forces of temptation and regret are most potent.”

               
—Entertainment Weekly
(A-)

“The narrators of Brown's second book of stories are mostly watchers—witnesses to sordid events in the fictional town of Vaughn, Maine. Through their eyes, the familiar routines of small-town life are transmogrified into emblematic ugliness. Some of the stories deal with Maine's twin preoccupations with boats and lumber, but the strongest anatomize the town with stunning emotional precision.”

               
—The New Yorker

“Some of these stories are so devastating that you may need, after finishing them, to set the book aside and simply be still. . . . Brown's ability to make your heart ache is a rare gift. . . . An exceptionally beautiful and devastating book.

               
—Los Angeles Times

“Like Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, Brown tells tales that are a morbid pleasure for those fond of both schadenfreude and horror stories. The perverse thrill of Brown's stories . . . is that they fail to trace a redemptive arc between failure and triumph, and they rarely pair kindness with gratitude. Instead, they treat human cruelty and shame, and they show that absolution should be sought, but not given.”

               
—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Readers of this collection will revel in these stories set in a single Maine town. Bordering on allegory, they offer a timeless look at the ways people confront bleak circumstances. Like the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brown's stories render the Gothic mysteries of Maine's forests, homing in on psychological evils rather than the demented horrors of Stephen King. But as Sherwood Anderson did in
Winesburg, Ohio
, Brown also captures the pulse of rural life and its small, hidden disturbances.”

               
—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“The title of Jason Brown's
Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work
promises the text as a collective explanation. Here, in this ‘linked collection' (all tales have roots in the fictional Vaughn, Maine), we'll find evidence of some native Northeastern immorality. . . . The devil might not demand evil as a prerequisite, but he'd surely want a people who could be swayed. Brown's characters don't disappoint.”

               
—San Francisco Bay Guardian

“[Brown] has a gift for crisp, angular sentences, some of which are embedded with a quiet humor. . . . What pushes the book far beyond sturdy realism, though, is its eerie grasp of the tensions between people and their assumptions (often wrong-headed) about each other. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Brown is fascinated by the shunned citizen, but here the clashes are not dictated by religion so much as faulty suspicion.”

               
—Time Out New York

ALSO BY JASON BROWN

Driving the Heart and Other Stories

WHY THE DEVIL CHOSE

NEW ENGLAND FOR HIS WORK

Stories by

JASON BROWN

Copyright © 2007 by Jason Brown

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

These stories were originally published in the following publications: “She” in
Harper's
; “Trees” in
Fish Stories
; “The Lake” and “Life During Peacetime” in
TriQuarterly
; “Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work” in
Epoch
; “Dark Room” in
StoryQuarterly
; “River Runner” in
Portland Magazine
; “North” in
Open City
; and “Afternoon of the
Sassanoa”
in
The Atlantic
.

Map by Kirstin Valdez Quade

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007935190

ISBN-13: 978-1-890447-64-9

OPEN CITY BOOKS

270 Lafayette Street

New York, NY 10012

www.opencity.org

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Open City Books are published by Open City, Inc., a nonprofit corporation.

For K. V. Q.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SHE

TREES

THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM

THE LAKE

WHY THE DEVIL CHOSE NEW ENGLAND FOR HIS WORK

DARK ROOM

A FAIR CHANCE

RIVER RUNNER

LIFE DURING PEACETIME

NORTH

AFTERNOON OF THE
SASSANOA

Everything Natalie said seemed, to herself, to have been said better by him. He was less fond of speaking, however, than he was of hitting people in the face, which seemed a more likely source of her love to those of us who were in speech class with him. It could be, we reasoned, she was in love with the kind of things he might say if he spoke more often.

It was easy for someone like David Dion to be casual about fate. He was still in junior high, but high school girls picked him up in their daddies' cars and had sex with him out at the pit. No one I spoke to on a regular basis had even been to the pit. He was not anyone's boyfriend, didn't need to be. It was hard to guess how old he was if you didn't already know, if he hadn't tumbled down into your grade from the grade above when he was held back. He couldn't be that smart, you could tell, from the way he grinned at himself, but he was smart enough to know he didn't have to be loyal to any one girl.

Dion fought high school boys all the time; that was nothing; once he broke his fist against the face of a man in his twenties before getting his own nose smashed against the pavement. In school he sat two seats away from me in homeroom, where he spilled over his desk, stroking his thin mustache and cracking his knuckles, one handed, one finger at a time. In wood shop we were partners, making a gun rack. I made the rack, he kept it. He slouched back in his chair, his elbows on the sill, looking out the window from the corner of his eye like a prisoner. Not even the shop teacher said anything. They were related, kids said. He was related all over, mostly in the next county, where every other ice fisherman was an uncle, every other woman behind the cash register an aunt, and the rest cousins. He could walk into any store out there and borrow ten bucks; he owed everyone, even me, at least that much. I lent him one dollar at a time. He rolled the bills into joints and smoked them or sold them for two dollars, making a few bucks, he said, for later at the bar.

When Mr. Dawson of Dawson's Variety was told by one of his basketball players that Dion, their center, was in love with Natalie, he pictured the ridge of her muscle extending up from her knee into her track shorts. He had seen her the day before with Ron, the high school boy she went with, who was going to drop out to start in the air-conditioning business with his father so he and Natalie could get married as soon as
possible. Her best friend, Denise, whose information was no better than second hand at this point, said, Well, it wasn't Love with Ron. Mr. Dawson overheard this. Denise was standing in his store with her friends Kristy and Francis waiting to buy a diet soda.

“I thought,” Mr. Dawson said from behind the counter, “she was with that boy Ron.”

“Well, she was,” Denise said, secretly pleased at being the center of attention. “It just wasn't love,” she said, her voice rising. “Anything but. Just a thing. This is Love.”

My friend Andy's mother said, shaking her head while sitting at their kitchen table with a half dozen of her friends, that Natalie had bloomed too early. That's why people thought she should stay with Ron, who was a good thing in the long run, even though he was homely, with a protruding jaw and blemishes over his cheeks, and he was older. He was one of the Catholic boys, who would wait, and by the time they were ready and married she would have lost her looks, be heavy and distended, those legs thick as posts; just when no one else wanted her he would be there with enough desire stored up to blind his true sight for a lifetime.

One of the things Natalie loved about Dion was that he always let the other guy have the first shot. He never in his life coldcocked a guy. He let them know first, sometimes days in advance. Someone would tell the guy, and they would meet. If the guy went down,
the fight was over. That was one of the things she loved about him. Dion walked away, or sometimes helped the guy to his feet. Once you get over the fear of getting hit, the same every time, he told me in wood shop, it doesn't matter what happens.