Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
Nathan Dixon. Radical Red: Stories. BOA Editions Ltd., 2025.
If a brief Internet dive into genealogy is correct, authors Nathan Dixon and David C. Dickson share a common aristocratic ancestor traceable to thirteenth-century Scotland. Both variations of this surname denote sons of Richard Keith, erstwhile royal bodyguards and custodians of the Crown Jewels. The family, which dispersed into Ireland, Australia, Canada, and America, forfeited its title when an earl joined the Jacobite Uprising in 1715. Despite this shared family tree, one is hard pressed to find common ground between Dixon’s Radical Red and Dickson’s Down to the Root. Each of these collections takes the genre of short fiction to a new destination.
REBECCA DUNCAN is Professor of English and Director of General Education at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC. She teaches and writes on British and post-colonial literature. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Genre, Mosaic, Southeast Review, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Pisgah Review. Read her essay on Zoe Kincaid Brockman in NCLR 2019. She reviews frequently for NCLR.
David C. Dickson’s characters in Down to the Root lead tough lives. A generation of bootleggers begets one of drug dealers running meth labs. Aging parents are seen as obstacles to a better life for morally empty, financially insolvent thirtysomethings. Some of these younger adults view murder as an acceptable solution to life’s challenges or a personal grudge. Yet a compelling storytelling voice draws us into these disordered lives, especially to the random encounters between strangers, both in Texas and North Carolina. A bartender and collector of motorcycle parts and memorabilia meets an artsy, cosmopolitan photographer. An aspiring documentary filmmaker, young and privileged, pursues a reclusive artist. Throughout the collection, the dialogue is fresh and authentic. It is not difficult to “hear” an
TWO WRITERS DIVERGED: NEW DESTINATIONS FOR SHORT FICTION a review by Rebecca Duncan David C. Dickson. Down to the Root: Stories. Redhawk Publications, 2024.
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unhurried Southern voice giving each story added layers of depth and texture in the back corner of a little bookstore. Dickson also works the fine line between the eccentric and the grotesque. In the title story, for instance, we follow Samantha Green up a remote and “greasy with carrion” (63) mountain road to find Danny Ray “Pinky” Pack, a black albino folk artist. Pinky creates masks and dioramas and carvings out of natural materials and leaves them on the roadside to be scavenged. Samantha’s mother was one such scavenger, and now she promotes Pinky to her wealthy friends. And so, along with Samantha, we expect to encounter the man who engaged with the mother’s cocktail party guests: “Wearing a second-hand Dashiki, jeans and brogans, he looked every bit the part of the outsider artist” (66). At his junk-littered home, however, Pinky presents more grotesquely, in nothing but cut-off jeans, his sunbaked skin translucent and unworldly. He unleashes a constant stream of sexual innuendos and shows the well-dressed, well-mannered Samantha crude renderings of genitalia and sex acts carved from tree roots. His concept of a film leans more toward pornography than art. Samantha rallies her inspiration and persists, but it is hard to imagine a reader who shares her concluding desire “to capture his existence on film” (76). Our response to Dickson’s grotesques is intensified by a thoughtful choice of narrators. Like Samantha, the narrator who gives us the homicidal Mark Frierson in “Matters of Honor” is at first innocent and naïve. In