Pitiful Criminals

Again deriving prose from his troubled life, Bottoms offers 13 short slices of factually based crime fiction. He opens and closes with Michael, his older brother, a paranoid schizophrenic portrayed in harrowingly painful detail in Bottoms’s 2005 memoir, Angelhead: My Brother’s Descent into Madness. Now, emerging from 15 years in a psychiatric treatment facility for setting the family home ablaze, Michael reaches out for contact, but Bottoms feels forced to “cut him loose” for his own sanity’s sake. Other entries, most of them set in suburban Virginia, include “The Minister’s Handyman,” in which a young woman is stalked, raped, and murdered by a crazed neighbor, who then buries her in her own garden; “The Shooter,” about a gun-crazed high schooler; “Scarface,” about a drug-dealing pothead with deadly hubris; “Attempted Murder Mystery,” about the author’s tribulations as a kindhearted landlord; and “The Man Who Found Two Bodies,” about the discovery of several young boys’ bodies in the woods. Graphically fortified with crude line drawings by W. David Powell, the book depicts these atrocious events with economy, precisely delivering mood and motive in the span of a page or two. Though sunny skies are a rarity here, Bottoms has created a skillfully rendered and devilishly unorthodox set of meditations on the “horrors people do.” Agent: Jenny Bent, Bent Agency. (Aug.)