Aside from their geographical proximity and formalistic architecture, the two books share something else: a concentrated focus on the lonely, the depraved, the neglected the “twisted apples,” in Anderson’s phrase, or the toadstools “stuck to a rotten log,” in Pollock’s that prompted Anderson to originally title his work “The Book of the Grotesque.” But whereas Anderson tucked the grotesque beneath the staid and steady public lives of his characters, doctors and other professional types among them, Pollock’s characters addicts, runaways, squatters, rapists, aspiring molesters, many of them one signature away from internment in “the group home” wear their grotesqueness high up on their sleeves.

It’s also the central character of Pollock’s collection of linked stories, in much the same way its northern neighbor, Winesburg, played the lead role in Sherwood Anderson’s famed story cycle. A baseball diamond, built by a Vista worker in the ’60s, then swiftly reclaimed by green briars, and also a church but that too, as Sandy’s boyfriend notes, “had fallen on hard times.” It’s a mean little place, in Pollock’s rendering, where the dominant occupation seems to be petty crime, where wife-beating louts drink Old Grand-Dad out of car ashtrays and where restless teenage boys spend their weekend nights throwing darts at the fat kid and compensating him with bong hits. Once there was a store, selling gasoline and Doan’s liver pills and cigarettes and chain-saw oil, and also a tavern, Hap’s, where the bartender dealt speed on the side.

Located 60-some miles south of Columbus, Knockemstiff, which derives its name from a long-ago fight between two women, is a ramshackle cluster of “shotgun houses and rust-streaked trailers” where the air is suffused with rotten-egg-scented smog from the local paper mill.

And even that’s suspect, since the tattoo seems less a proud-spirited nod to her hometown than a dog-tag-like reminder of where she needs to return, or be returned. The only display of civic pride evident in Donald Ray Pollock’s first book is a blue tattoo the words “Knockemstiff, Ohio” etched “like a road sign” on the bony white backside of a crackhead named Sandy.

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock