Brutal Beasts

There are places you always call home, their smells rotting or warm or sweet, their bruises just deep enough to forgive until you touch them. There are places you leave that will forever contain you or cling to you or cry out for you. Where the difference between love and disgust is no more distinguishable than the point at which you stop trying to forget.

Craig Buchner's Brutal Beasts is a trip to these homes. It opens the door and finds us at the edge of a falls weighing the jump, of a bedroom where a father's crumpled body lie failing, of the ability-and the desire-to love through what seems so repulsive.


Across eighteen stories Brutal Beasts realizes a visceral, addictively painful sense of familiarity with the violence and regret and compassion that bind the word home to its places and its people. Its characters navigate a litany of memories without knowing exactly why, or what they look for, except that despite how badly it hurts they keep looking. Buchner's stories achieve an honesty that is hard to confront not just because of their brutality, but because we find ourselves at home in them."