Barker House

December 2, 2019
Moloney’s taut, haunting, and surprisingly hopeful debut takes an unblinking look at America’s criminal justice system. Built as a series of linked stories that pivot between the perspectives of nine officers who work at a bleak New Hampshire jail—including veterans such as Leon, who works in the kitchen; Big Mike, who moonlights as a strip club bouncer; and rookie Brenner, the only female recruit—the narrative tracks the events of a year as characters endure family tragedy, romantic entanglements begin and fade, marriages crumble, and officers die. But no matter what’s going on outside the jail’s walls, it’s the workplace frustrations and power struggles within that dominate everyone’s attention and inescapably shape them. The author, himself a veteran corrections officer, anchors the stories with quotidian details of prison life and a viscerally drawn setting that leaps off the page. One officer likens his unit to a slaughterhouse, filled with “old, shed animal matter” and stains that “look like scars from hacking tools.” This strong work is an indelible look at how people respond to extremes and fight to hold on to their humanity in dire conditions.

February 15, 2020
A collection of linked stories that explore an often overlooked class within our criminal justice system: corrections officers. New Hampshire's Barker County Correctional Facility, colloquially known as the Barker House, is a squalid, private, for-profit jail staffed by men and women trying to juggle work in the jail--where the general consensus is "this place will change you"--with their angry children, dying parents, second jobs, and DUIs. Most would rather have been police officers but, lacking connections, education, or military experience, settled instead for life in corrections. Some, like Brenner, the only female officer on her shift, are perplexed by "abrasive" officers who consider their jobs a sentence, "every task a trial, every inmate an enemy." Others, like Kelley, a pacifistic young officer who objects to a beating he witnesses in the House, ultimately do change: Kelley eerily manages to dehumanize inmates while maintaining his nonviolent nature, referring to them only by their inmate numbers. In his daring, important, though at times uneven debut, Moloney, himself a former corrections officer, demonstrates a keen sense for detail and an intimate knowledge of his subject. In one moment he shows us the creativity of the small-scale sadist--Mankins, on the restricted unit, opens the rec yard door on frigid winter mornings when his inmates are trying to enjoy their showers--yet in the next shows us Big Mike, who moonlights as a bouncer at a strip club and whose father is dying of cancer, allowing his female inmates to "wear eye makeup they'd made from colored pencil shavings" on visiting days even though makeup is against the rules. The power of Moloney's crisp observations, however, is partially diminished by some very careless sentences ("In the way of Tully's happiness seemed to be his marriage but he would never say") and his often repetitive story structure. Read the end of the first chapter--in which Mankins, our quiet sadist, towel-dries a crippled, freezing inmate while still not shutting the door--and you're like Wowzers, that's complicated, nicely done; but when the same formula is applied to a half-dozen more endings, one begins--in between those brilliant details--to disbelieve the construct. Generally beautiful, sometimes unconvincing--very much a debut.

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