THE DEAD FISH AT TWENTY MILE AND OTHER STORIES FROM BODOCK, MISSISSIPPI is set in a mythical town of nine-hundred-and-forty-eight Bodockians on the northwest corner of fictitious Claygardner County. Much like the canon of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha works, the stories in this collection contribute to the myth of Bodock-from the fictional town's origins sometime in the 1830s, to the turn of the twenty-first century-while exploring such themes as mortality, regret, folklore, the New South at the end of the twentieth-century, and the relationship between man and nature. With the exception of the title story, the occasion for these stories is the ice storm which devastated much of the Mid-South in 1994. To accomplish this myth creation, the stories often employ folklore, magical realism, pathos and comedy, and storytelling, as influenced by Lewis Nordan's Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find.
