Sorry I Worried You
This is one of the 2004 winners of the annual Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press.In Fincke's 12 disconcerting stories, the characters work at strip malls, pilfer expired beer from landfills, and grapple with ill health. Combining quirky dialogue, vivid details, and small moments of epiphany, Fincke keeps his readers both intrigued and off balance. His characters are a bundle of seeming contradictions and complications, often plagued by chronic ailments and a sense of loss. In "The Lightning Tongues," a visionary llama rancher yells at his animals and beats his wife. In "Wire's Wire, until It's a Body," a disgraced professor, recently denied tenure, helps his wife with her calamitous neuroses and experiences an emotional breakthrough. Although Fincke's characters are often unlikable, his premises are never less than provocative. His background as a poet is obvious in his use of elliptical dialogue and arresting images, and his brainteasers often mask an underlying yet subtly evoked sense of despair.Joanne WilkinsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved