Barry Hannah delivers the goods. In a short story collection that is not intentionally linked he creates a fabric of the outsiders and dispossessed that makes you want to be one of their number. He laces together a patchwork of narrative in this collection that is both abominable and excellent. ( )

With Barry Hannah you get a writer than has probably been to the depths and can tell what it’s like. He also knows what matters and can describe it, while heaping contempt on what doesn’t matter.

High Lonesome has some absolutely searing stories. “Get Some Young” (which opens with one of the best paragraphs in fiction) is at once a humorous, insightful, disturbing, and memorable story of corrupted youth. Several stories involve men haunted by their killing of other men, or women. In “The Agony of T. Bandini” it’s war veterans. In “Uncle High Lonesome” a long ago bar fight shapes a man’s life. A writer in “Drummer Down” mourns the death of a friend by his own hand.

The consequences of love matter as much as those of death. Love is central to Hannah’s work, but it’s not perfect. A troubled husband in “Carriba” describes his marriage as clinging “to a buoy even though half of it’s shot away.” Some love doesn’t work anywhere, as in the case of two illicit lovers in “Two Gone Over:” “There was no good place, there was no right place for us.” Snerd, in “Snerd and Niggero” is haunted by his inability to love. “All those thousands of books around him thirty years and what they had made him was a monster insensate as a concrete city lion.”

Hannah can encapsulate a character in one unconventional sentence. In “Carriba” a man who killed his mother (another killer!) in a drunk driving accident is “the permanent bottom line of horror, maybe even another breed.” A woman is “currently over in Hattiesburg failing at something menial.”

Published in 1996 and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, High Lonesome remains vital and original. ( )