According to Rash, an Appalachian poet and story-writer, one of the greatest crimes of the 1960s was introducing drugs to white, working-class southerners: "If you were some Harvard psychology professor like Timothy Leary, drugs might well expand your consciousness; here they worked the opposite way round, shrivelling the brain to a reptilian level of aggression and paranoia." This collection, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story award, features a hollowed-eyed cast of trailer-dwellers, struggling farmers and unemployed construction workers, stunted by poverty and addiction to crystal meth. In one story, a man is reduced to paying his mother's medical bill by robbing civil war graves. Rash remains respectful of the ancient verities of the Appalachian soul  "People who believed the world could reveal all manner of things if you paid attention"  even while despairing of the clientele of a roadhouse who demand that the house band plays Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" every hour on the hour.

Ron Rash's stories, set in the Appalachian mountains, are portraits of rural desperation, of lives blighted by poverty, drugs and grief. Though the world they depict is a grim one, the stories themselves are not unremittingly bleak. A Rash leitmotif is the sudden small moment of uplift  a character acting with unforeseen humanity, a bully finding himself on the receiving end. Good, when it occurs in these stories, is all the more satisfying for being so hard won.

The collection, a 2010 Frank O'Connor award winner, gets off to an arresting start with agricultural whodunnit Hard Times. Set during the Depression, it describes a farmer's attempts to puzzle out who is responsible for a spate of egg thefts. Suspicion falls first on the dog of a neighbour. But the truth, when it emerges, is much more shocking, yet strangely life-affirming too.

Another high point is Dead Confederates, a comically macabre account of a plan to loot ornaments from the graves of Confederate soldiers. The story hinges on the moral difference between the narrator, who goes along with the scheme in the hope of obtaining the funds to foot his mother's medical bills, and his partner, who is motivated by simple greed. The distinction is a key one and points to a philosophy articulated elsewhere in the collection  that good ends may justify bad acts. As the narrator of Dead Confederates puts it: "Doing what we're doing is a sin for sure, but not taking care of the woman who birthed and raised you is a worse one."

Punishing though the atmosphere of these stories is, many have a ferocious tenderness at their core. Rash writes well about the bonds between children and parents and, in particular, the pain that ensues when they are severed or corrupted. A heartbreaking example is The Ascent, about a boy's attempts to come to the aid of his crystal meth-addicted parents, who respond by exploiting his innocence. Rash's adult characters, no less than his child ones, tend to find themselves in positions of extreme vulnerability. The difference is that they at least have a chance of fighting back.