Pollock is a former paper-mill worker who drew on social problems that haunted friends and relatives for his first book, Knockemstiff, a collection of dark stories set in rural southern Ohio. His characters are damaged souls. There's a mother who asks her son to creep into her bedroom with scissors and act out a serial killer fantasy. There's a drunken father who orders his 7-year-old son to clobber another boy in the restroom of a drive-in movie.
The book's title is a nod to Pollock's hometown, a hamlet of a few hundred people about 10 miles from Chillicothe that had gravel roads, rundown housing, a few general stores and a rough-and-tumble reputation when Pollock was growing up. The roads are paved now, but the place is still a crossroads.
''It's not nearly as wild as the stories in the book,'' says Pollock, 53, sipping coffee over breakfast at a local restaurant. ``I took that hard-core reputation and sort of cranked it up a couple notches.''
The result is a bleak, sometimes violent look at people on the fringes of Appalachian society who aren't typical fodder for publishing giants such as Doubleday, which released the book in March with 27,000 copies, about five times the average for short-story collections.
Publishers Weekly and The New York Times compared Pollock's book to Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson's 1919 masterpiece of small-town life. Amazon.com added it to its list of top new releases for March.
Knockemstiff is filled with degenerates, but Pollock doesn't mean to portray his hometown as a Gothic freak show.
''I probably pushed the envelope as far as you can go without stereotyping or going too far to the point where you're just making fun of these people. And making fun of these people was never my intention at all,'' says Pollock, a high-school dropout who has battled drug and alcohol addictions.
The book's characters are trapped in life or in situations that they don't want to be in, he says. Some are looking for a way out; others are beyond redemption.
Pollock got sober in 1986 after a fourth trip to rehab, then started taking night classes at Ohio University, where he graduated with an English degree in 1994.
''All my life, I thought writing would be a nice life but never had the discipline or determination to try,'' says Pollock, an avid reader who drove a dump truck at the paper mill. ``When I was 45, I realized if I didn't give it a shot, it would be too late.''
He began his eight-year quest to become a professional writer by typing out stories by Ernest Hemingway and others, studying their use of language and sentence structure.
Some of his early stories were published in small journals. In 2005, with the support of his wife, Pollock quit the paper mill where he'd worked for 32 years to seek a master's degree in creative writing at Ohio State.
''It's apparent to me how much he wants to be a writer,'' says Valerie Vogrin, an editor at Sou'wester, a journal that published some of Pollock's early work. ``Every word is there for a reason.''
Pollock's former colleagues at the mill have enjoyed watching his emergence as a writer. What's shocking about the grim stories in Knockemstiff isn't the subject matter but where it comes from, says mill worker Curtis Hurley.
'Don is kind of a quiet guy. That's why when you read the book, you think, `Hey, I didn't know he had these thoughts in his head,' '' Hurley says.
People in Knockemstiff and Chillicothe, setting for a few of the stories, aren't upset by the crude portrayal. Everyone, Hurley says, gets that it's fiction.
Ohio State awarded Pollock a one-year fellowship, which he is using to finish a novel about a serial killer whose crime spree is intertwined with the story of a teenager yearning to escape life in the hills.
He works on the manuscript up to five hours a day, typing on a computer in the attic of his Victorian-era house.
''I got lucky,'' Pollock says. ``I've gotten a lot of nice compliments, and don't get me wrong, I like to hear them, but I don't want to get arrogant enough that I believe that stuff. I just wouldn't be the same writer.''
