Book excerpt: From a maintenance worker whose long-simmering grief pushes him to steal a wealthy client’s child “Pool Boy” to an out of work manager plotting revenge on the boss who fired him “Golden Years”, Eric Lloyd Blix explores the fallout of American progress. The stories in Physically Alarming Men span landscape and history, from the Depression-era Midwest to a speculative Middle-East: a trio of fraudsters set up camp outside a peat bog in a scheme to kidnap and exploit two backwoods brothers rumored to possess the gift of healing “Bemidji”; while under house arrest, an idiosyncratic man-child contemplates violence, mass media, and the philosophical underpinnings of his incarceration while waiting for his mother to bring him milk “Call Me Randy”. At times lyrical, gritty, and strange, these provocative stories depict the lives of outcasts, criminals, and screw-ups of various kinds: characters wracked by history and their own failings.