As If We Were Prey

by Michael Delp

120 Pages

Paperback
9780814334775
Publication Date: March 2010

$15.95

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Praise

A dark, rollicking collection of stories about men prone to foolishness trying to make their way in a modern world.

In As If We Were Prey Michael Delp presents working-class male characters who are tried, tested, and pushed to their limits. Struggling with the demons of childhood and the indignities of adult life, they work dead-end jobs, keep the peace within their families, and attempt to assert themselves against authority whenever they can. While Delp’s characters are fathers and sons, students and teachers, they all share a sense of alienation and melancholy that propels them to antics and ill-conceived plans. Although they hope that their rash actions will prove their independence, they generally only reveal their essential vulnerability.

Set mostly in small-town northern Michigan, Delp follows boys and full-grown men who know how to fight, fish, and hunt, but struggle to use those skills to overcome the emptiness and dysfunction of their day-to-day lives. A boy takes revenge on the neighborhood bully and watches his downfall with unexpected emotion, a man visits a tourist attraction with a caged bear and empathizes with the creature, a teacher quits his job and hits the road as a one-man trivia quiz show, a father shares his childhood stories of defeat with his young daughter and inspires her to settle a score, two men catch a giant bass and keep it in the bathtub all winter to fatten it to prize-winning size, and a Vietnam vet and shop teacher switches into combat mode to teach his students a chilling lesson.

The stories in As If We Were Prey are both humorous and haunting, fast-paced and tender. Fans of Delp’s writing as well as all readers of fiction will enjoy these stories of men pushing the limits of their lives.

Michael Delp is a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction whose works have appeared in numerous national publications. He is the author of Over the Graves of Horses (Wayne State University Press, 1989), Under the Influence of Water (Wayne State University Press, 1992), The Coast of Nowhere (Wayne State University Press, 1997), and The Last Good Water (Wayne State University Press, 2003), in addition to six chapbooks of poetry. He teaches creative writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy and has received several awards for his teaching.

This gritty and visceral debut collection of short stories is as much prayer as it is prey, the characters-in all their haunts and desires-rendered compassionately, their collective instinct to love as fierce as their instinct for survival. Indeed 'the heart is a lonely hunter,' and it's a wild, feral, sometimes frightening insight into human nature that renders these stories all the more real, and therefore all the more beautiful."

~Jack Driscoll, Author of How Like an Angel

Michael Delp has written a fearsome book. In a world where humans have overrun the wild, fenced it, or caged it like the bear in 'Mystery Park,' the men in these stories pay a visceral price. They flail, attack, recoil, rage. Delp looks unflinchingly at this distortion of nature-one species, its own predator and prey."

~Janet Kauffman, Author of Trespassing: Dirt Stories &Amp; Field Notes

From the moment you peer through the binoculars into the room of the Nazi-worshipping bully across the street, you know you're in the hands of the rarest of pros. Michael Delp is a writer so skilled he becomes invisible, leaving you changed into all these people he's imagined. From the unstumpable Master of Minutiae, to the man showing his daughter the basement where he lost boxing match after boxing match as a kid, to the title story-perhaps the most harrowing tale of teacher burnout you'll ever read-these people are real, and they are you."

~Pete Fromm, Author of as Cool as I Am, How All This Started, and Night Swimming