What do You think about A Stranger In This World: Stories (1995)?
Kevin Canty gives the his admissions of humanity in A Stranger in This World. This a book of 10 individual short stories. Each story contains different characters and different events, while maintaining an overall theme of strife and personal reflection. The stories contain drug addicts, alcoholics, sexual desires, and everything dirty in the world. He contradicts this with human emotions, compassion, and beauty. There is blunt honesty oozing through the pages. Usually his main characters are those caught in the middle. They are the sons of alcoholics and runaway parents, girlfriends caught in life or death situations, youth on the brink of adulthood trying to make the grown-up decisions, middle-aged attempting to peace together broken lives, and a dog killer. They all face traumatic events, circumstances that would leave a person to choose a path. Some characters are faced with a fork in the road, they can either choose to keep on in the way they were, in sadness, behind bars, or free themselves of burden and responsibility. Most are just honest people trying to understand the world and deal with the problematic lives they’ve been thrown into (humanity).tThe book begins with, “King of Elephants,” about a teenager, Raymond, with two alcoholic parents. In a story where the roles of parent and child have been reversed, Raymond is burdened with the volatility of his unpredictable and irresponsible parents. As he explains his mother, “we passed her around like the black queen in a game of hearts, the cops to the hospital, the hospital to my father, my father to me. I was the one who could not pass her on.” He dreams of a life far away and without them. “The Victim,” centers around a teenage girl, her insecurities and her half-caring boyfriend. When she’s put in a life or death situation and finds out a little more about herself. In these stories you get to feel what the main character feels. “Junk,” is a story about a middle-aged man, who is trying to live a less chaotic life now. With a new, strait-edge, girl with less dramatic hobbies. He’s turning a new leaf when the past catches up with him. Canty takes you on a wild ride, drinking, doing drugs, high speed chases avoiding gun wielding bikers, pistol toting drunks, car accidents. Each story is perfectly crafted with specific details sparking your five senses. The language pulls you into the story world with images of mountain tops, the smell of waxy band-aids, the feeling of a breath on the back of your neck. You are in the car with a blind man behind the wheel. You are standing in a tipped over mobile home, grabbing beers out of a refrigerator on its side. You are in the kennel, feeling the insanity of constant barking. You are in a dark room, unaware of your surroundings. Canty paints the picture, surrounds us with the story, its inhabitants, its dangers, and its kindness. The language is brutally honest. Some stories are told in first person and some in third person, but all are so detail oriented and well crafted that you believe you’re reading non-fiction, actual accounts. His stories are fiction, but they become real and somewhat personal.
—David Breedlove
Each of Kevin Canty's short stories from this collection is so unique and completely different from the previous one. He is realistic, but in the same way that YA conemporary books tend to be realistic but optimistic: his stories are realistic but pessimistic, often in the worst-case-scenario. He shows that life is far from perfect. There are bad marriages. There is sadness. Not everyone likes themselves or their lives.For me, the stories of this collection did not resemble anything in my life at all, but I was still able to acknowledge the messages they were sharing. It is not quite universal, in that not every theme can apply to everyone, but that is because these aren't meant to be fables or moral stories, they are fictional short stories that resonate well with the reader. At first I thought the stories were all about boys, but I soon figured out that they could appeal to people of any age, male or female. Canty's characters come from all walks of life, so I'm sure each person will get something different out of this book. Kevin Canty perfectly evokes the human voice of imperfection.
—Owen
