There’s a certain type of decay that some writers like to romanticize. The weeds sprouting among the ruins of an abandoned mill become a bountiful garden. Not so in Poke, South Carolina, the common setting in Wounded Boarders, an uproarious collection of new stories from George Singleton. This former mill town is in need of serious repair, and the protagonists who find themselves stuck there are more focused on tearing out old sheetrock than they are on spying unexpected beauty. Nor do their trials leave them wiser, stronger people. They’re tired and disillusioned, and they’re likely going to stay that way.
Singleton’s stories are full of creepy store clerks, entitled college students, and bigoted authority figures that his narrators “don’t much cotton to.” They are also full of wounded veterans dedicated to their shuffleboard club, passionate coin collectors, and wildly accident-prone parents. This is not a romantic view of a declining, opioid-riddled middle America. But it is a sharp, surprisingly compassionate, often hilarious one.
An interesting tension emerges in the collection between the past and those recounting it. Many of the narrators claim to remember things a certain way while acknowledging the possibilities of revisionist history. Some characters seem to be losing their memories altogether. And over it all is the veneer of a Southern culture “immersed in the brine of old war remembrances.” This subjective approach to the past often seems to leave the characters stymied in the present. Their lives become both fated and arbitrary. They can neither move forwards or backwards. As the title of one story suggests, they become bobbleheads, looking up and down but never straight ahead. Often these tales end with us questioning if there is a path into the future that is not constricted by our view of the past.
The fixation on the past raises another question that feels central to the collection: Is anything really trivial? Time and again, a character will trace the course of their life from some seemingly minor moment. If it weren’t for that pair of binoculars, that awkward joke, that aimless joyride, a whole other reality might’ve unfolded before them. The stories are also bursting with lists. Board games, Latin phrases, bird species, types of coins—we’re constantly bombarded with the type of minutiae a Jeopardy! contestant would covet. This flow of seemingly trivial information accumulates a kind of hypnotic power. Suddenly these lists, and the seemingly inconsequential lives characterized by them, feel mesmerizing and far from trivial.
Another common thread in these stories is their dark humor, particularly a kind of morbid slapstick with characters injuring themselves in outrageous ways. It’s the Three Stooges with significantly more hospital time. Many characters have missing teeth, giving them smiles like “broken picket fences.” In that way, they seem to carry the failed promises of suburban life in their bodies. And so, even while we’re laughing at their physical misadventures, an undeniable empathy grows for these characters who are trying to climb a slippery stair for themselves and their children.
But where broken things exist, so do the fixers. From roofers, to a house flipper, to a man providing tarps to hurricane damaged properties, we constantly encounter people intent on repair. The attempts at repair aren’t limited to homes, either. A man enters hypnotherapy to repair his marriage, a father writes a winding letter in hopes of repairing his relationship with his estranged daughter, a man sets out to rectify the mis-delivery of several packages. Like the cluttered merchandise of a pawn shop in an old mill town, Singleton’s collection gathers together an eclectic assortment of dented and dinged lives that we must shift through to discover what may be refurbished.
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Publication Date: August 11, 2026
Reviewed by B.B. Garin
B. B. Garin is a writer living in Buffalo, NY. Her story collection, New Songs for Old Radios, is available from Wordrunner Press. She is a recipient of the Sara Patton Fiction Stipend from The Writer’s Hotel. Her work has appeared in The Hawai’i Pacific Review, Luna Station Quarterly, Palooka, 3rd Wednesday, Crack the Spine, and more. Connect with her @bb_garin or bbgarin.wordpress.com.