The Blessings of Hard-Used Angels is John Cottle’s debut collection of short fiction. Winner of the 2003 George Garrett Prize, these are stories of everyday people, common on the surface but existing at the edges of ordinary life, quietly desperate, searching for small blessings and simple comforts. The stories are set mainly in the South and exhibit that unique connection between the land and its people. The characters run the gamut from lawyers to loggers, from preachers to drug dealers. Some are funny, some are tragic, some filled with hope, others with despair. All reveal a small slice of the human condition from a thoughtful and entertaining perspective.
Praise for The Blessings of Hard-Used Angels.
George Garrett, the series judge and author of Death of the Fox, says of this book, “Beautifully written, crafted with care, strongly plotted, these stories are about superbly developed characters, people whose lives matter.”
Maryanne Stahl (Forgive the Moon and The Opposite Shore) says of John Cottle, “his words stir the imagination, startle the senses and stimulate the spirit. Honest, compassionate, moral and wise, without ever coming across as holier than anybody, John Cottle is the real thing, a natural-born writer.”
John Dufresne (Deep in the Shade of Paradise, Louisiana Power and Light, and The Way that Water Enters Stone) says, “The Blessings of Hard-Used Angels is so much more than a promising first book by a hugely talented writer; it is a stunning literary achievement, a haunting story collection of the first order. I was flat knocked out. This guy loves his characters. He’s breathed life into them, and they breathed life into me. I can’t forget them and don’t want to. The stories are exhilarating to read; some are breathtaking and achingly beautiful. When I finished The Blessings of Hard-Used Angels, I walked around for days seeing the world through its light. Do yourself a favor, buy this book, get in on the secret before everyone else knows what you soon will: here is the future of Southern fiction.
Daniel Wallace (Big Fish, and The Watermelon King) says: “John Cottle writes like the lovechild of Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner. The Blessings of Hard-Used Angels is weird and beautiful and honest.”
Excerpts.
From Playing Bingo for Money:
Choices.
My life is beset with choices. To be or not to be; Straight up or on the rocks; Paper or plastic. Beset, befuddled, bedeviled, becudgeled, besmothered, beslobbered, … bethumped … with choices. Choices bedamned, my inner voice bemoans as I enter the parking deck in my Buick LaSabre. The attendant approaches menacingly. I can feel him wielding more choices.
“Gone be leaving before noon or staying all day?”
I freeze momentarily, considering how to respond to this either-or. My mind shuffles the options. I am headed for the Bedford County Courthouse to try … or to try to settle … the case of Aggie Bingo vs. Holston Trucking Company. Five other cases are set on this morning’s docket. Which will the judge call first? If not Aggie’s, will he send us away until another day? And there is still the possibility of the oft-maligned courthouse-steps settlement. I could bedone and begone by ten o’clock. But if we start the trial, I’ll be here all day. I concoct an ingenious reply, craftily weaving all possibilities into one succinct response that I deliver with casual aplomb.
“Depends.”
From Clyde and Jake:
They cut all morning and well into the afternoon before they broke. Sitting in the truck with the doors open, they ate the ham sandwiches from the paper sack that Clyde had brought and a can of sardines that Repton contributed. They were miles off the paved road, and the only sounds besides their own voices were the wind through the treetops and the occasional bleating of a hawk. Clyde chewed on a sardine as he looked out through the cracked windshield. “You believe in ghosts?” he asked.
Repton paused to consider. “Why you ask?”
“Cause I wanna know, goddamnit. That’s why I asked.”
Repton scratched his sideburn. “Ain’t never seen nare ghost myself,” he said. “But Lilly, she say she seen em before. Seen her mama coming cross that field behind our house. But me, I ain’t never seen nare one.”
“You believe Lilly?”
Repton swallowed a bite of his sandwich. “I reckon if she say she seen it, then she sho’nough did see it.”
Clyde thought this over as he chewed. “Did it talk to her?”
“I can’t say as I recall her saying.”
“You think a ghost can talk to a man?”
“If a ghost wanna talk to a man, then I reckon it can.”
Clyde finished his sandwich, pulled a grease rag from his hip pocket and wiped his mouth. He looked at Repton. “If a ghost told you to do something, would you do it?”
Repton looked away thoughtfully. “I guess that gone depend on what the ghost tell me to do.”
“What if it told you to kill somebody?”
Repton shot Clyde a sober glance. “Then I’d sho’ think that over mighty careful. A ghost like that liable to been sent round by the Devil.”
From Nocturnal Birds:
The girl he now eyed over the tools and transmission parts and piston rings and scatter of the garage floor had been sent to him six months ago by O’Connor while he was bedridden with an extended case of flu. She was known to most of Springdale’s 1200 inhabitants only as Squirrel, few of them ever having heard of the name, Mary Garmon. She lived in a singlewide house-trailer near Arceneaux and supported her sparse existence with various odd jobs, most of which involved caring for the sick. She had brought him groceries and medicine and even done a little cooking and laundry, and when he got over the flu, she continued to do the same things for him and he did not complain. Nor did he complain when she came to him one evening and slowly peeled away his blue work jumpsuit and then her own clothing, and took him to bed and lay with him until morning, nor even when she brought her toothbrush and the small box of toilet articles to leave for the convenience of regular weekend visits. As he watched her now through the stir of dust off the concrete floor, bringing the small sack that he knew contained a baloney sandwich and a can of sardines, he did not see the thick flesh that hung from her arms or the coarseness in her skin or the chestnut flush of her teeth, but looked instead upon an approaching comfort--a hard-used angel bearing common blessings--and a smile came up under the grime of his face as she waded toward him through the clutter.
