“Life is pure misery for the women and children in HARD TIMES (Bronzeville Books, 184 pp., paper, $12.99), Les Edgerton’s bone-cracking, Depression-era yarn set in the backwoods of East Texas. Even someone like Amelia — smart enough to win school prizes and cunning enough to carry a machete — gets caught up in the brutal cycle of life for women in these parts. (“Just try to stay out of the way,” her mother advises her when her father forces her to marry Arnold Critchin, who assaulted her on their first date.) When Arnold’s moonshine business lands him in jail, Amelia is left to fend for their four children and her husband’s pack of vicious dogs. The novel veers straight into thriller territory when Lucious Tremaine, a fugitive from Louisiana, stumbles into this treacherous backwater and Amelia becomes his only hope of eluding the savage locals. Dogs, husbands, killer outlaws — we know which beasts we’re rooting for.”

“ Stephen J. Golds might be in his late thirties, but that’s considered young in the old-curmudgeon guy dominated world of noir and crime-fiction. If he represents an “out with the old, in with the new” wave of upstart crime-scribes, he’s succeeding because of his instinct to dip into the old murky reservoirs and cleanse it with a fresh push forward. In fact, there’s something river-like about his narrative prose; a steady flow, accelerating beyond what is safe, into heart-pounding rapids, then washing the reader onto a muddy bank to reflect on what the hell just happened as another undercurrent slowly sweeps them away again.

If not his style, then consider his dizzying record of output. 99.9 % of everything he’s written this year — whether poetry, flash, short story, non-fiction — has been published.