Off the Beaten Path

While the collection's idea is about stories that take you off the normal path of storytelling, it does have a few consistencies throughout all of the stories. Of them, very few characters are morally pure, and lack at least some level of intellect that would allow them to make commonsense decisions even when in a bind. There is a lot of "What do I do with the body?" moments in this. Author is from the mid-East region of the USA, and as a non-American reading this it seems sort of like one of those, "I could totally see someone Tennessee pulling these stunts." Once you catch this as a theme, it gets easier to digest. But this is the one unifying theme amongst them all, salt of the Earth type of people turning on each other, evoking the most irrational solutions, and trying to end each other.
I didn't like the characters, and once on the third story I got that basically everyone is going to get their dues, someone always dies, and that's a given throughout. In that, there can be a sort of twisted joy pulled from reading this. The author marinates on horror and spectacle, and people getting eaten very slowly and painfully is a theme in a few of these. Hard to stomach (pun!) at times. Schlock, visceral horror. The writing is solid, clean, executed well. They're good at what they do. My major gripe is that there isn't a lot of variation outside of the archetypal morally ambiguous person from story to story.
I look forward to see more of the author's work in the future, and learning from his marinating horror.