The Home Depot

By: Peter Dahlstrand

Narrated by: Peter Dahlstrand

The Home Depot is a series of interconnecting vignettes about the workers on an overnight freight team in a suburb of Chicago. The people in them are real, and the incidents are true. Though vulgar, outrageous and violent, their stories are told with much humor and an absence of self pity. There is pain at the bottom, but also laughter.

©2021 Peter Dahlstrand (P)2024 Peter Dahlstrand

Absolutely worth my time and attention

The Home Depot is a short book, but it lands like a gut punch. I sincerely enjoyed it and found it intriguing, unpretentious, and quite understatedly artful in its writing. The book is basically a series of (inter)connected stories, or "short story cycle", that revolves around the goings on among floor staff, much of it after hours or behind-the-scenes and away from customers' eyes, at a Home Depot, somewhere outside contemporary Chicago, IL.

The premise is simple enough and the events are easy to follow. They'll be perfectly relatable to anyone who has worked at a large retail company, regardless of whether it's a home and hardware shop like Home Depot. Anyway, I found the way the author jumps directly into the stories refreshingly brisk. He doesn't waste time with fancy world-building and excessive character development and backgrounding, etc. This is smart (and sadly uncommonly concise) storytelling, in my opinion. We already know this world and the author's sketching of his characters is sufficient to summon clear, if not always full or rounded, portraits of these individuals. I don't need the full and rounded treatment that a humanizing novelist might give them. And I appreciated this book more for not doing that. The stories read much like the sort of crazy, common shit you might hear out of the mouth of a clever stranger sitting next to you at the local dive. The tone of these anecdotes is direct and straightforward, and certainly they have a bleakness and painful quality, and may even be a little depressing in their outcomes, but they contain a lot of real human comedy. And that doesn't come without pain. And--I would add the author's preface casts the same unflinching honest eye on himself that he (or his narrator?) does on his subjects. I liked that. This is a very strong book, and not really like anything I've read. I recommend it highly.

I see one other rating for this title--a 1 star review by someone who left no comment to clarify their low opinion. I suspect this listener was expecting something more along the lines of Nicholas Spark's The Notebook, set in Home Depot. That is definitely not this. And thank goodness.