Do Not Look Directly Into Me
Short Stories. Paper, Perfect Bound
Green Bean Press, 2001
ISBN 1-89140817-8
Excerpt from "The Insect Family"
I never tore the wings off house flies as a kid, you know, although I used to have a fetish for taking insects to the verge of death as a child. I used to to it in all kinds of creative ways -- setting earthworms on hot asphalt, then taking them off before they fried to cripst bacon. I'd set them back into the soft, cool mud to see what happened. It fascinated me to test a variety of bugs to see what kind of endruance they had, to see what kind of will to live they possessed.
"Daniel Crocker is one of the two or three best writers of short fiction to emerge from the small presses in the last couple of decades. Blessed with a gift for the enigmatic narrative and realistic dialogue, and have acquired a braod range of working class experience--pure Americana--he has studied his craft and polished his skills. I expect readers coming to his work for the first time to be astounded by the talent, versatility, and authenticity on display here. He is a product of Twain Country in many senses. I enjoy his work immednsely." -- Gerald Locklin, California State University, Long Beach
"Dan Crocker is the new laureate of working class America. He steps into the shoes of formidable forbears, the likes of John fante and Nelson Algren. Dan understands the suffering of poor people and he writes of them with a respect that is as pure-hearted as their own dignity and the invisible merit" (to use a Buddhist term) that all downtroden people have. Do Not Look Directly Into Me is a book about humanity where it is hardest hit, in the devastation of broken families, large and small losses, and the daily defeats it can at times seem impossible to surmount. And yet this is a book of redemption of the strongest and most meaningful kind--which comes from the loving care and attention of a devoted wordslinger's hard-learned craft. In Do Not Look Directly Into Me, Dan Crocker proves that he hasn't given up on the human race, and eh gives us all good reason--more desperately needed in our present age than ever before--to keep believing with him." -- Gerald Nicosia, author of Memory Babe and Home to War
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