Not one to settle for common time frames or settings to tie his stories together, the pieces in Jim Ruland’s debut collection Big Lonesome are so different from one another in time and space (and style, for that matter) that one marvels at the amount of research he must have done -- as well as the facile imagination needed -- to bring them all so entertainingly to life.

Whether it’s Belfast during the Blitz or the Fatherland during WWII; the high Sierra during the Wild West; or the horrific images of the meat packing industry in old Chicago, the places evoked in Ruland’s stories are so viscerally realized that you can’t help but be transported.

“[He] elucidates the finer points of hog slaughter as we make our way across the pens. They cut ‘em open, trammel the carcass and hoist ‘em into a vat of boilin’ brine. The soup loosens the bristles, makes it easier to scrub ‘em off before they’re quartered and sent to market. Hogs are hard to kill, boyo. They shit and piss and discharge great quantities of filth when they hit the soup.”

This passage is indicative of how well Ruland incorporates the stomach-turning details of the slaughterhouses of early last century in the story "A Terrible Thing in a Place Like This" without succumbing to the dread modern day writer’s malady of ‘infodump.’ With a nod toward Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Ruland crafts a tale about an Irish immigrant whose deadly facility with a snickersnee (a sledgehammer-like implement used to smash cow’s brains in) gains him some prestige; then he contracts an airborne infection that makes him delusional; and his own coup de grace in the final scene is an ironic inversion of his past fame.

The stories range from the fantastic and tongue-in-cheek (the unauthorized biographies of the cartoon characters Popeye and Dick Tracy; the travails of a mob hitman named Big Elbow Marconi; and a stuffed animal equipped with the protagonist’s older sister’s brains) to historical realism (Berlin during WWII, the streets of old Chicago, and the High Sierra 150 years ago). But -- and this seems to be a Ruland trademark -- the fantastic keeps finding its way into the more serious pieces, as well as the profound into the initially fantastic. For example, a young German girl avoids a brutal rape by escaping into her very own Hollywood ending; the seemingly metaphoric brain-in-the-stuffed-tiger story ends with a terrible revelation the video game-addicted protagonist wasn’t even fully aware of himself; and a hard-riding robot pops up in the middle of the title story, which is set in the Wild West.

Those readers used to some overt sense of continuity in their short story collections may have a hard time relating to Big Lonesome. But for those who are willing to see beyond the surface layers, into the often-muddy elaboration of theme, the stories can be said to be linked by a common existential dislocation of the human spirit. In these stories, this dislocation is most often exacerbated by technology, whether exemplified by bombers over Belfast, or Dick Tracy on the moon. And the title Big Lonesome becomes a thematic guidepost blinking at you from the front cover like a flashing yellow, hidden in plain sight.