Tales from the Rio Grande Valley that are as beautiful as they are bizarre.
Bizarre short stories from a Texan with a punk-rock heart.
Austin author Flores’ first two books, Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas (2018) and Tears of the Trufflepig (2019), have already made him something of a cult favorite among readers who appreciate his frequently funny, almost always bizarre punk-rock sensibilities. His new collection is set in the same off-kilter world as his previous works, but it also expands on it. In “You Got It, Take It Away,” named after the legendary Tejano singer Johnny Canales’ catchphrase, a Mexican American man encounters his difficult, probably racist neighbor, who shows him a mysterious piece of cloth that defies the laws of the natural world. When he asks about it later, the neighbor becomes belligerent, convinced the man had broken into his apartment. The story ends on a surprisingly sweet note—Flores doesn’t sacrifice compassion for the sake of weirdness. “The 29th of April” is grounded more firmly in reality—painfully so. The narrator chronicles the descent of a town into gang violence: “The reporters stopped coming when we started finding them dead,” the narrator reflects. The story is told mostly in one long paragraph, giving it an exhausting kind of urgency; it’s both beautiful and intensely heartbreaking. All the stories here are excellent, but the best is perhaps “Pheasants,” in which a coffee shop worker named Tito Papel encounters an angel stuffing their face with a discarded piece of birthday cake; Tito asks them to leave, but they keep coming back, and the two banter good-naturedly about language and theology. The cake-loving spirit denies they’re Tito’s guardian angel, but the ending suggests they might have been playing it coy. Flores’ prose is a delight throughout the book, and his love for the unearthly always feels natural, never self-conscious. One character reflects, “Strange stories had helped me give meaning to the painful moments of survival, and strange stories were the only things I could continue feeding into the machine.” Could that be Flores’ own manifesto? Whether it is or not, his own strange stories are some of the best to come along in quite a while. This is an accomplished book from an author determined to keep literature weird.
Tales from the Rio Grande Valley that are as beautiful as they are bizarre.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-3746-0413-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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