“Delp finds dark inspiration for these loose stories in the complicated transformation of boys to men. Delp is very at home in places where there’s little hope amid the self-perpetuating ordeals of failure and defeat.”
“The writing is sharp and alluring. It’s pretty funny, too, and the narratives are crisp. Many of the book’s pleasures are the surprises. Delp has a genuine artfulness—his literary chops are such that he is co-editor of the series—and you can see that in the way he uses language to suggest so much more than is there on the page.”
— The Sunday Chronicle (Muskegon, MI)
“From the moment you peer through the binoculars into the room of the Nazi-worshipping bully across the street, you know you’re in the hands of the rarest of pros. Michael Delp is a writer so skilled he becomes invisible, leaving you changed into all these people he’s imagined. From the unstumpable Master of Minutiae, to the man showing his daughter the basement where he lost boxing match after boxing match as a kid, to the title story—perhaps the most harrowing tale of teacher burnout you’ll ever read—these people are real, and they are you.”
— Pete Fromm, author of As Cool As I Am, How All This Started, and Night Swimming
“This gritty and visceral debut collection of short stories is as much prayer as it is prey, the characters—in all their haunts and desires—rendered compassionately, their collective instinct to love as fierce as their instinct for survival. Indeed ‘the heart is a lonely hunter,’ and it’s a wild, feral, sometimes frightening insight into human nature that renders these stories all the more real, and therefore all the more beautiful.”
— Jack Driscoll, author of How Like an Angel
“Michael Delp has written a fearsome book. In a world where humans have overrun the wild, fenced it, or caged it like the bear in ‘Mystery Park,’ the men in these stories pay a visceral price. They flail, attack, recoil, rage. Delp looks unflinchingly at this distortion of nature—one species, its own predator and prey.”
— Janet Kauffman, author of Trespassing: Dirt Stories & Field Notes
Collection of short stories ‘As If We Were Prey’ is rooted in Michigan’s masculinity
by Dan Hawkins, Grand Rapids Free Press
What Michael Delp, a teacher at Interlochen Center for the Arts, has to say in “As If We Were Prey” goes to the heart of living in Michigan and all its crannies and to masculine roots. It just about covers everything, from hunting and fishing to fighting. The collection of short stories about men, part of Wayne State’s “Made in Michigan” series, has many merits. The writing is sharp and alluring. It’s pretty funny, too, and the narratives are crisp… Read more
Michael Delp Seeks Answers Through Short Stories
by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
The magic thing about writers is that we get to watch the way they think. They leave a trail of pebbles behind them, a body of work that, with good writers, expands, then flattens into a wide vista of explored ideas.
Michael Delp, teacher of creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy and writer of many books of poetry and fiction, including: Over the Graves of Horses, Under the Influence of Water and more, is one of these good writers. With, As if We Were Prey, his new book of Michigan-based short stories from Wayne State University Press, he takes old and new themes and drives them and us to new places.
“Commandos” is the disturbing story of a boy bullied by a cruel young neighbor. The boy can see into the bully’s second story bedroom—with binoculars. He takes stock of the Nazi paraphernalia; the photo of Adolph Hitler. The boy and a friend plan to humiliate their torturer, blindside him into tripping over a wire stretched between trees. When this fails, and his attempt at revenge only deepens his misery, he is left to watch–almost without emotion – until the bully’s life plays out at the end of a rope.
In the story, the boy’s grown self looks back from a different place and sees that the boy he was, never had a chance; that triumph wasn’t waiting in the wings. The older man knows that life doesn’t play out according to a self-written script; that the bully had “. . . no real dad to come down to pick him up. No friends. I’m thinking about his vacant eyes, the smoke of Camel straights rising up out of his sneer, one of his engineer’s boots propped up against the wall—waiting like a bird of prey.” Read more