Allegheny Front

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ALLEGHENY FRONT HAS FEW SENTIMENTAL TRAPPINGS. Traveling salesmen meet up with the guns of the landed poor; tourists die, loggers die, cranky uncles are pulverized. But as often as men kill each other in Matthew Neill Null’s singular, strong collection, they kill animals more. And not just game animals, either: black bears are massacred, bald eagles killed and crucified. In these intelligent and unpretentious stories, men’s stubbornness is a rock face, their anger a crown fire, their occasional tenderness a rill.

In an era where even the more esoteric of literary fictions tend to have moved away from the rural, away from the beasts of the forests and fields, away from land-based individual sustenance and the rhythms of seasons and tide, Null’s stories are remarkable for both their sharp relevance and their otherness. They seem to uncover a texture of living that’s increasingly alien to urban readers, who, for better or worse, make up the lion’s share of buyers and borrowers of contemporary literary fiction in the United States. It’s a gritty texture precisely defined by the details of natural places, without the slickness and bright primary colors of highly engineered, exclusively human habitats. Null’s subtler palette is browns and greens, yellows and grays, the blues of sky and water.

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