In Gas Tank & Other Stories Dennis E. Bolen – author of several books including Stupid Crimes and Krekshuns – offers a glimpse of the world through the eyes of the beaten and destroyed, everyday people who have been so wounded by life that all they know is loss and unfulfilled yearnings. His characters – soldiers, fishermen, factory workers, and ambulance attendants – occupy lives that are slowly disintegrating, lives they no longer want to inhabit but can’t seem to escape. Yet Gas Tank & Other Stories isn’t just another work of gritty realism or a chronicle of beautiful losers. Bolen tempers the moral dissolution and despair of these stories with a unifying vision of survival and transcendence, of self-affirmation achieved through rage and struggle.

While the six stories in Gas Tank are dissimilar in content and voice, they are identical in their exploration of the mechanization of the individual. Bolen presents the modern world as increasingly bereft of higher causes and ideology, a place in which there are no differences between soldiering and fighting, prostitution and factory work. Everything becomes just a job, and people are merely parts to be used for the job.

There’s nothing new about these concerns but Bolen makes them fresh by infusing them with acts of personal defiance. Factory workers sabotage their own careers in order to hang on to dreams of a better life, a young fisherman kills the boss who is abusing him, a soldier wanders the battlefields of France with no allegiance to anything but his own survival. These stories are testaments to individualism, chronicles of regular people raging against the social and economic machines they are caught within.

These stories are viciously real and don’t always end happily, but they do leave us caring about the characters and their struggles. And in Bolen’s world, this act of caring is a triumph in itself.