The author, Chris Offutt, is a rather enjoyable novelist in his own right. I recommend his short story collections "Kentucky Straight" and "Out of the Woods" for a start. What I find unusual is his perspective: His fiction is set in a very rural and poor environment, and clearly he had a foot in that himself once, but no longer quite fits in (A dilemma spelled out in his memoir No Heroes — and there was a battle on comment sides whether he did or did not misrepresent his native area).