Physically Alarming Men

From a maintenance worker whose long-simmering grief pushes him to steal a wealthy client’s child Pool Boy to an out of work manager plotting revenge on the boss who fired him Golden Years , Eric Lloyd Blix explores the fallout of American progress. The stories in Physically Alarming Men span landscape and history, from the Depression-era Midwest to a speculative Middle-East: a trio of fraudsters set up camp outside a peat bog in a scheme to kidnap and exploit two backwoods brothers rumored to possess the gift of healing Bemidji ; while under house arrest, an idiosyncratic man-child contemplates violence, mass media, and the philosophical underpinnings of his incarceration while waiting for his mother to bring him milk Call Me Randy . At times lyrical, gritty, and strange, these provocative stories depict the lives of outcasts, criminals, and screw-ups of various kinds: characters wracked by history and their own failings.