Drift and Swerve

Drift and Swerve is edgy and wonderful. Ligon creates compelling characters and these stories are touching, comic, tragic - I was sucked into this world immediately and couldn't wait to find out what happens to Nikki. One of the best collections I've read in a long time.

Excellent writing. Ligon's stories are tightly crafted to keep the reader turning the pages. More than just a collection of short fiction, Drift And Swerve holds within it a greater narrative that glows white hot, the cinematic stories that feature Nikki, a teen girl wandering around America not trying to find anything, only trying to escape herself. At the same time each piece stands alone. Great stuff. Buy this book.

Drift and Swerve is an invitation to rummage around in a junk yard where we examine interesting pieces, recount stories of special interest, and divert to the next piece that catches our discerning eye. Ligon steers us from "Providence" to "Orlando," from "Vandals" to "Cleavage." The trip appears to be long, but in fact, is a journey that begs for more.

After Safe in Heaven Dead, I'd hoped for another novel, but this book of stories, DRIFT AND SWERVE, might be even better. Here, as in his novel, Sam Ligon's characters struggle against compromise and corruption, spitting in the face of futility. But because there are more characters, facing a variety of dilemmas, the scope is wider here. And because the stories are so compressed, each is a fully realized representation that feels bigger than it's few pages. Characters include two kids in the back seat of the title story, squabbling but allied against the random power in the front seat. There's also a deceptively compatible couple, homeward bound on the last road trip of their forsaken marriage. And then there's Nikki. Nikki was born in the creation of "Dirty Boots," a story Ligon wrote for Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth. Nikki anchors the collection by opening each of the four sections and by closing the book, turning eighteen on a Greyhound bus. Each time she returns, you're glad to see her--despite the grimness you find her in, her reality being a sort of Reagan/Bush years dream unfulfilled, a place where freedom is bought with a bag of weed or a chunk of the body, and innocence is that part of your soul you'll never sell or allow to be taken no matter what you have to suck to save it. Book jacket blurbs often cite the author's compassion or the characters' redemption, but Nikki would be pissed if you suggested that she needed either. Still, you can tell Ligon loves her, and maybe that's why I did. And though some of the characters here don't inspire as much sympathy as Nikki does, Ligon's a master. From his effortless dialogue and narration to the shape of the stories and the book, both his ear for language and his eye for structure are unmatched. If some of his characters are trapped in their fatal trajectories, I get the feeling that Ligon, even as he's transcribing their stories, is as horrified as I am.