Dennis Chandler
The cover of The Devil Takes One and Other Stories depicts author Dennis Chandler kicking back on the porch at his home near Blue Mounds — a bottle of whiskey at his side as he gazes out over a vast expanse of trees and rolling hills.
It’s an apt image for this self-published collection of 15 moody stories set in rural Wisconsin. The pieces are linked by characters trapped in the bleakness of small-town living, the hollowness of splintered families and the uncertain poignancy of aging.
Heavy on exposition and ripe with ethereal details — “The deputy’s bluish spotlight beam strafed cutover soybean fields like a scene from a prison break movie” — these wordy stories meander. They take readers far from where they begin before reaching a final destination, and some might even require a rewarding second reading to better illuminate characters’ motivations and appreciate Chandler’s narrative nuances.
The retired carpenter’s work previously has appeared in Journal from the Heartland: Wisconsin (2017) and Journal from the Heartland: Close to Home (2018), both from Amherst-based Blue Bus Publishing.
The Devil Takes One’s opening story, “Manifest Destiny,” sets the tone for this collection. An arrogant social worker from the big city (Milwaukee) is demoted to duties in a small town. There, he bullies his clients until a puff on his pot pipe during a welfare workweek event sends his already-tenuous career into a deep freefall.
“A Superior Craft,” meanwhile, appears to take place in Madison. A man assists his professor friend by tending to a young science researcher studying psychotropic drugs who “had broken the rules, ingested the product, and started swimming outside the ropes.”
Other stories involve a backwoods birthday party (“The Makeover”), a mysterious troubadour who compares himself to legendary bluesman Robert Johnson (“And All Wines Flowed”), a cranky opioid addict (“Home Care”), and an outdated cult-film actor scraping by in a dilapidated church (“No Tokens for an Afterlife”).
But “A Girl’s Blue Shoe” ultimately emerges as the best of this collection. A tragic late-night accident along a desolate stretch of snowy road leads to a heartbreaking affair between an abused and childless wife and a taken-for-granted basketball-coaching husband.
It also contains another one of Chandler’s memorable scene-setting lines: “All that afternoon, the sky had looked like an amateur’s painting, the horizon a canvas with poorly rendered gray clouds.”
Sit back and take your time with this one.
