Fight Scenes

July 28, 2008
This collection of autobiographical stories by Bottoms (Angelhead
) is set in the world of suburban strip malls circa 1983. These coming-of-age vignettes (accompanied by Powell's gritty chapter illustrations) feature Bottoms as a 12-year-old from in southeastern Virginia who's become attached to his buddy Mark and to Mark's divorced father, Bill, a macho, profane, hard-living construction worker: “He made me want to drink, to have command over women, to get good at all of it, to tell these kinds of stories, to be a man.” Left to their own devices, Greg and Mark spend the summer getting high, drinking beer at abandoned construction sites, trying to avoid the town bully and navigating their first crushes (“I imagined us from above—as if we were in a movie—a movie in which we were about to have hot, carefully lit, and musically accompanied sex—and I wasn't almost a foot shorter than she was and my muscles were bigger and I didn't have braces or a first peppering of zits”). This collection is filled with short, humorous scenes and pitch-perfect, sex-obsessed adolescent dialogue that illuminate a boy's uneasy journey toward adulthood.