Trey Popp wrote up a mini-review and interview for the new issue of Main Line magazine, a glossy about the fashionable suburbs of Philadelphia.


Main Line magazine
(click through to page 68)

If the unofficial gospel of the new century holds that The World is Flat, Philadelphia-based author and historian Greg Downs begs to differ.  In his debut story collection Spit Baths, which recently won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Downs defines his characters by the places they come from and the people they leave behind.

Small towns in Kentucky and Tennessee loom large in this collection, most poignantly when strip malls and chain motels threaten to erode their unique character.  But Downs isn't trafficking in simple nostalgia: For many of his characters, escape from the quaint or not-so-quaint past can't come soon enough.  Some flee with their feet only to find the past has somehow followed them.  Others discover that even if you never physically leave it, you can never come back home again.

In Downs' best story, "Between States," an older woman returns to her childhood town and tries to impose her idea of what the place used to be onto what it has become--going so far as to paint almost-forgotten family names on the doors of the houses that have passed into new hands.  There's a sense that the other residents feel some pain over what's been lost, but in the end, they prefer to turn away from the town's past entirely, literally taking the highway bypass around its center so they don't have to be reminded of what it used to be.  Yet the very effort they put into forgetting is revealing.  As Downs shows repeatedly in this strong collection, even the places we think we've behind never quite let go of us.