Reviewed by Cam Howe
Bodock:
Stories
by Robert Busby
Hub City Press
June 2025, Softcover, us$16.95, ISBN: 979-8-88574-051-7
Strictly speaking, Robert Busby’s debut Bodock is a short story collection, but at times it feels more like reading a novel. Each story takes place within the same shared universe, mostly revolving around the 1994 Mid-South Ice Storm in a fictitious Mississippi town. While each one carries weight individually, the links that tie the stories together creates a momentum – one that, fittingly, snowballs as the collection progresses and as you learn more about the town’s hidden history and buried secrets.
The threads creating the tapestry are often thin, though. Rarely, if ever, will the same characters appear across multiple stories. There’s a joy to be found in wondering whether you’ve just met an unnamed character from a previous story, or if the same dinghy bar or stretch of road is being used as the setting. Despite the lack of crossovers, Busby still manages to make Bodock feel like a fleshed-out, lived-in town, with a community of believably-flawed people.
The Deep South location is established through Busby’s descriptions of creaky porches, decrepit trailers, unkept backyards, and the 90s setting is painted through well-chosen, grim detail (“a plastic takeout bag that overflowed with Hardee’s wrappers and the crusts of partially-eaten burgers and Kleenex he’d shot off into while watching porn on the TV–VCR combo”). The way some characters see the world helps you stand in their shoes – simple but relatable expressions like “the sun had not yet burned off the morning chill”. When it comes to dialogue, an audio version isn’t necessary to hear the voices of Busby’s characters, with subtle nuances and some truly memorable sayings (“I’m happier than a lone prick in a well-staffed brothel”). This level of authenticity can only be achieved by knowing a place inside and out, and you get that sense with Bodock.
The characters are predominantly blue collar men – working, doing everyday chores, solving family matters. The processes behind electrical rewiring or heating insulation or butchering game are described in a meticulous, methodical detail reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy. There’s a pervading tiredness with most of the cast, a world-weariness, and, most importantly, a reluctance to face demons. Many characters have health issues or disabilities, but it’s their mental turmoil that is the biggest weight to bear – and most of the time, they avoid doing so at all cost. You lose count of the number of stories that feature drunk drivers, miserably working through a six-pack sat on the passenger seat of their truck. Despite many of the characters having similar traits, they are all distinct enough to have you empathising for them in some way, even when many are morally grey.
Bodock has a mysterious, supernatural folklore, rooted in the bois d’arc tree that gave the town its name, but Busby chooses to delay revealing this right away. Rather than ordering the stories chronologically, he waits until you’re a good chunk of the way through before flashing back to “Bodock, 1816-1834”, where we learn about the town’s disturbing origins. A couple, cursed by one of their slaves, become eternally entwined while making love:
The couple’s now-singular torso reached the topsoil where Cyrus’s legs took root and anchored into the red clay earth. One of Exa’s legs had splayed over the footboard of the bed, kicked out and then up into its own sort of skinny trunk that branched out into smaller limbs and branches and twigs.
This revelation gives greater poignancy to the stories that come before it, while changing the way you view all that come after. You get the same everyday characters, doing mostly everyday things, but with this new knowledge you read more into their emotions and struggles, knowing that an unseen energy lies underneath the town.
Near the end of the collection, ‘Twenty Mile’ has a similar effect to the origin story from earlier on, altering your preconceptions about Bodock. Fleshing out the supernatural undertones, we learn that a version of the town exists in the afterlife, populated by ghosts from throughout its history. Suddenly, after a number of stories taking place in very natural, grounded surroundings, we have a toothless Civil War colonel chatting away to a 21st century school counsellor over a glass of bourbon. This revelation makes Bodock feel instantly re-readable; with a reshaped idea of what the world is like, you want to go back and experience the stories again, wondering how the characters will fair if and when they make the transition to this afterlife.
It’s a fitting curveball, as it hammers home how much death features throughout Bodock. In both “Fraternal Twins” and “Heartworms”, we see young boys process the significance of death via the passing of animals. Parents grieve over lost children (“Offerings”), men at the end of their tether contemplate suicide (“the Parable of the Lung”), accidental killers struggle to come to terms with another life ending at their hands (“Steer Away from That Darkness”). At the end of “Steer Away from That Darkness”, in arguably the collection’s most chilling moment, Bradley faces his own death head on:
He settled in for whatever came next, the pain of weakening breaths too much to let him steer off into that darkness just yet.
Even when Busby’s characters aren’t in the process of dying, their thoughts will often drift and become existential – worried musings about what comes next and where they’re going with their lives. But more often than not they don’t find the answers they’re looking for. They don’t know about the spiritual version of Bodock that awaits on the other side, and so will instead pause their worries to avoid dealing with it, put a pin in their mental crisis to crack on with everyday life. In “Offerings”, Noal cuts off his introspective despair to focus instead on the more immediate police business at hand:
Maybe she’d just been better than he’d been at speeding up the minutes of a day until they collected into hours that concluded one more planetary rotation closer to slipping off into the long sleep where memory couldn’t follow. He was getting carried away and moved back to an earlier realization: the deer in the haypatch two days ago didn’t look nearly as professionally done as these.
To avoid straying into sentimental melodrama, Busby also uses this to create some of the funniest moments in Bodock; “You would’ve taken that branch down with you anyway,” Topher says to his ex-father-in-law, as he talks him down from committing suicide.
There are only 11 stories in Bodock, and one – the meditative “Seasonus Exodus” – is only a couple pages long. But in this debut collection, Busby manages to present the history, folklore and inner workings of an entire fictional town – a town populated by characters tackling the full breadth of human experience.
About the reviewer: Cam Howe is a freelance writer, covering everything from music festival coverage to pro wrestling news. His work has featured in the likes of Wonderland, Clash, Still Listening and UKHillwalking. He lives in Beckenham in South East London.