Past Due Book Reviews: Calloustown by Georgle Singleton, Published November 10, 2015

In these fifteen short stories revolving around life in a small, Southern town, George Singleton chronicles the improbable lives of the residents of the titular Calloustown.

With his seventh collection of short stories, George Singleton turns his signature wit and comic voice to the unlikely residents of the fictional Calloustown, South Carolina, each of them as worn and abrasive as the town’s name suggests.  Though the stories are not connected by plot, they are invariably told from the perspective a middle-aged, male narrator, who, in relaying his memories and experiences, invariably reveals a deeper story—and a deeper truth—within each narrative.  Singleton invites us eagerly into his world—a world populated among many others by county maintenance workers who go out each night to dig potholes in the roads to prevent being laid off, by a taxidermist who boasts the world’s safest petting zoo, and a woman who, by some accident of biology, suffers from sexual arousal through stimulation of the tear ducts.  As retribution for being denied employment with both the forest service and the fire department, a brick mason aspires to build the state’s tallest fire watchtower in his backyard.  Residents attend a local festival celebrating the U.S. invasion of Grenada.  This is Calloustown.  The residents of this town are down-and-out and at the end of their ropes.  The only bar in town is self-serve and it operates on the honor system.  This is a  town that never recovered from a sense of inferiority that during his infamous march to the sea, General William T. Sherman had passed Calloustown by, not considering it worth the fire to burn it down.  Thumbing their noses at the long deceased general, each year, Calloustown residents correct this historical oversight by burning down a life-sized replica of the town courthouse—a courthouse that never existed.

George Singleton is a mad genius of the Southern comic short story.  He writes with irreverence, never settling for cliché or sentimentality.  Though his stories are with filled to the brim with his personal brand of humor and absurdity, he invariably shines light on his characters through a lens of compassion and, beneath the layers of humor and absurdity, reveals the pathos of human existence.