The Cornstalk Man
Fiction. Paper, Perfect Bound
Green Bean Press, 2002
ISBN 1-89140827-5
Excerpt from The Cornstalk Man
It was well into November before Cynthia told Mamma about her relationship with Tom Orr. It was a fairly crisp evening, not quite cold enough to frost, but thinking about it. Mamma’s behavior had become erratic. Sometimes she was as sweet as summer blackberry. Other times she was as bitter as venom. Those times were growing closer together. Still, other times, I just didn’t know what to make of her.
We were all at home when Cynthia broke the news to Mamma. Will was alone in our room and had been all day. I had learned to let him be at those times. I was on the couch, listening to Mamma cuss about cooking supper. Cynthia bustled about the house nervously, picking things up and trying to help Mamma with supper when she would let her.
“What’s wrong with you?” Mamma finally asked when Cynthia tried to reach over her shoulder to stir the brown gravy.
“Mamma,” she said, “I’m in love. I really am.”
“Really?” Mamma seemed indifferent.
“Yes. All those dates I’ve been going on lately have all been with the same wonderful man.” Any minute I expected Cynthia to start mooning over how dreamy Tom was. Just like the kids on TV did.
“And just who is this man?”
“You already know him, Mamma, that’s the good part. It’s Tom Orr.”
“Tom Orr,” Mamma mulled the name around, “Sis’s teacher. The one who unloaded his crappy dog on us.” Mamma continued to cook dinner.
On one of the gravel backroads between Eddi Rabbit's Rocky Mountain Music and Rovert Boswell's Kentucky is Dan Crocker's The Cornstalk Man. It's about mothers and fathers, sisters, and borthers, and it stays with you longer than you'd think 134 pages could, is one of those stories you remember not all the way as something you read, ut maybe as something you heard, maybe something from your childhood, something that really happened. Not many novels can do this. The Cornstalk man can and does.
-- Stephen Graham Jones
Dan Crocker's novel, The Cornstalk man, is a brillant new class-to-be in the tradition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Kristen Bakis' Monster Dogs. Crocker, like them, is an author who won't look away from horror's highbeams. Crocker's version of the Monster is a psychoogical surgery: whip-stitched pieces of people most intimately real to young Rebecca Thompason--her family, particuarly Mamma, vengeful and beloved. The Cornstalk Man emerges from the boogie-man stories by rother Will, a myth that parallels the dark secrets the children must bear. Yet as the Conrstalk Man lurks in the corners of their minds, another Monster leers into the mirro, stands over their beds where, in Crocker's slieght-of-words, "you can see the zipper on the monter's suit." And, as the sayign goes, there's one in every family. The layers of relationship that Crocker conjures scintillate, thrill, and threathen. This is not only a riveting bildungsroman but a map of how to survive growing up."
-- Susan Swartwout
"I am struck by how oddly funny and scary [Crocker's] work is--edgy in the very best way, like if Stephen King had Raymond Carver's heart and an ear for music."
-- Laura Kasischke
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