Out of the Woods starts with one man leaving his Kentucky hollow and ends with another who realizes he can't return. In between, Chris Offutt's broke, lonely, or just plain down-on-their-luck characters find out exactly how difficult it is to go home again, and how equally difficult it is to stop wishing they could. The critically acclaimed author of The Good Brother (a novel), as well as a memoir and a previous collection of stories, Offutt writes with rare honesty, insight, and restraint. "Sometimes I don't think I've done anything to leave my mark in this world. I'm the kind of person the world leaves a mark on," admits the narrator of "Two-Eleven All Around." The same might be said of all Offutt's Appalachian transplants, from the small-town sheriff of "Melungeons," forever marked by the violence and beauty of his mountain upbringing, to the rootless ex-con of "Moscow, Idaho," who wonders "if he'd ever find a woman, a job he liked, or a town he wanted to stay in." These lives are rendered in prose stripped so bare it reads like poetry--and yet is not without its own flinty wit. Given his first glimpse of his brother-in-law's corpse, the protagonist of the title story allows as how "he didn't look dead, but Gerald didn't think he looked too good either. He looked like a man with a bad hangover that he might shake by dinner." These are characters who get inside your head and stories worth reading again and again. As spare and simple as a Shaker chair, Offutt's tales should prove every bit as enduring. --Mary Park


From Publishers Weekly
Missing Kentucky, even when one lives there, is the emotional linchpin of the nine spare and stunning stories in this second collection by Offutt (Kentucky Straight; The Good Brother). Many of the entries previously appeared in magazines such as Esquire and Granta; "Melungeons" has been included in Best American Short Stories 1994. All deal with the magnetic pull of the Kentucky hills on those born there, and while a common theme enriches the cyclical nature of the collection, its repetitiveness sometimes makes one wish for a change of focus. Some narratives are straightforward: in "Darla," the eponymous protagonist returns to the hills after 30 years in Ohio, realizing that's where she belongs only after a real estate agent presses her to sell out. Other tales are more intricate. A Kentucky trucker washes up in an Oregon flood in "High Water Everywhere," then decides to go back to the hills after encountering a deputy sheriff who has resisted the impulse to leave his native turf because he knows everybody's intimate lives, and "the knowing keeps me here." "Two-Eleven All Around" plumbs a well of dark humor when the divorced narrator discovers "you raise someone else's [kids] while a stranger takes care of yours." From the protagonist of "Out of the Woods," who's never left his Kentucky county before, to the narrator of "Tough People," who learns in Montana that he's ruined for going back, the stories all resonate with isolation and lawlessness born in the Kentucky hills. These stories deserve to be parceled out, savored separately. Agent, Brandt & Brandt. (Jan.) FYI: Offutt has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Offutt's characters may leave the woods?that is, rural eastern Kentucky?but it doesn't leave them. Some have escaped to town or gone west, others have returned after trying to live elsewhere. Offutt's writing is as simple and straightforward as his characters, who are not angst-ridden or introspective but often use sex, alcohol, or violence to get through the day. Despite these similarities, there is great variety in plot. In "Moscow, Idaho" two ex-cons move graves to make room for a new highway. "Darla" tells of an elderly woman returning to her home on her own terms. Disparate characters are brought together during a flood in "High Water Everywhere." Recommended for most collections.?Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Idaho Lib., MoscowCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Leon Rooke
There is not one dud in the lot. Out of the Woods is a magical book.


From Kirkus Reviews
68482556.299 Offutt, Chris OUT OF THE WOODS Violence, dislocation, the contradictory yearning for sustaining roots and for the rootless freedom of the road, as well as the difficult negotiations between men and womenall figure in this strong and startling collection. Over the course of several books, including a debut collection (Kentucky Straight, 1992), Offut has been working a rich vein of material, dealing with the tough, laconic hill people of Kentucky, and based on the razor-sharp stories here, the vein shows no signs of being played out. The wonderful title tale follows the efforts of a relative newcomer to the culturethe isolated, ancient culture of those hardscrabble hillsas he struggles to adapt himself to his wifes taciturn, violent family. Sent to bail a brother-in-law out of trouble in another state, he discovers that the man has in fact been shot by his girlfriend, and died. Without cash but determined to impress the family, he manages to wrest the man's body from officialdom, then haul it home in the back of his pick-up. In Malungoons," a deputy who prides himself on having escaped from the lethal feud that has enveloped several families in the nearby hollows finds, in one bloody moment, that hes escaped his heritage after all. That archaic Kentucky culture, Offutt seems to suggest, is persistent, inescapable: it broods survivors, but it also breeds despair. Even those who seem to escape don't often manage to evade the kinds of hard blows life seems to reserve for the powerless and poor. In the astringent "Tough People," a couple on the road, scrambling desperately for a stake, and well aware that most things in life "will out you or burn you," sign up for "Tough Man" and "Tough Woman" fights to raise money; they get the money but destroy their love in the process. There's little good news in these nine tales, but there is in compensation ferocious portrait of an otherwise almost invisible culture, rendered in a salty, spare, memorable prose. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
William Kittredge It's my theory that I'll be reading Chris Offutt's stories from now until I'm far too gone to read. And then my grandchildren will read them aloud to me. The stories in Out of the Woods are emotionally accurate, incessantly vivid, and utterly compelling. This is a talent for the long haul.


Book Description
Seven years ago, Chris Offutt made his literary debut with Kentucky Straight, a fiercely original collection that earned him not only critical praise but many prestigious awards. The eight new stories in Out of the Woods mark Offutt's return to the form in which he first displayed his astonishing talent. Offutt, who "draws landscape and constructs dialogue with the eyes and ears of a native son" (The Miami Herald), is on strong home turf here, capturing those who have left the Kentucky hills and long to return. These are stories of gravediggers and drifters, gamblers and truck drivers a long way from home, tales that are so full of hard edges they can't help but tell some hard truths.


About the Author
Chris Offutt grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky and has held more than fifty part-time jobs. For his first three books -- Kentucky Straight, The Same River Twice, and The Good Brother -- he received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award. He currently lives in Iowa City, where he is a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The eight new stories in Out of the Woods mark Offutt's return to the form in which he first displayed his astonishing talent. In "Tough People," luck wins out over love in an unconventional prizefight. In "Barred Owl," when a bird strays too far from home and fatally loses its way, the Kentuckian who covets its pelt meets an identical fate. In "Target Practice," a man can't earn his father's respect until he shoots him with a rifle. These are stories of gravediggers and drifters, gamblers and truck drivers a long way from home, tales so full of hard edges that they can't help but tell some hard truths.

FROM THE CRITICS

Rick Moody - Bookforum

Out of the Woods is both admiring and suspicious, attracted and suffocated.... This is good storytelling.... Out of the Woods is a splendid, compulsive, heartbroken, misleading sequence of American yarns.

Leon Rooke - The New York Times Book Review

...[A] lean and brilliant examination of romantic obsession. But the love object isn't a girl; it's the state of Kentucky....Offutt writes about all this from personal experience....There is not one dud in the lot. Out of the Woods is a magical book.

Book Magazine

...[S]pare and tightly drawn vignettes...filled with a quiet despair that simmers under the surface...

Leon Rooke - The New York Times Book Review

...[A] lean and brilliant examination of romantic obsession. But the love object isn't a girl; it's the state of Kentucky....Offutt writes about all this from personal experience....There is not one dud in the lot. Out of the Woods is a magical book.

Kirkus Reviews

Violence, dislocation, the contradictory yearning for sustaining roots and for the rootless freedom of the road, as well as the difficult negotiations between men and womenn—all figure in this strong and startling collection.