I loved this poignant, colorful, and nostalgic look at life in Mexico City during the 1940’s. A young Carlos falls in love with his best friend’s mother, the misbegotten attraction launching an emotional odyssey that sends him through a landscape of class struggle and corruption. In his search for love and truth, Carlos sees his innocence chipped away by repeated episodes of hypocrisy and moral failure, from himself and those around him. “Love is a disease where only hatred is natural.”
This landmark novella-one of the central texts of Mexican literature, is eerily relevant to our current dark times-offers a child's-eye view of a society beset by dictators, disease, and natural disasters, set in "the year of polio, foot-and-mouth disease, floods." A middle-class boy grows up in a world of children aping adults (mock wars at recess pit Arabs against Jews), where a child's left to ponder "how many evils and catastrophes we have yet to witness." When Carlos laments the cruelty and corruption, the evils of a vicious class system, his older brother answers: "So what, we are living up…
A seemingly bottomless plunge into the horror genre. Jones artfully blends a nostalgic look at life in 1980’s small-town Texas with the expected blood-soaked scenery of an over-the-top horror tale. Convinced he is a serial killer, Tolly Driver plays with our minds in a plot that backtracks on itself, erasing clues as it presents new ones. I love how he’s plenty aware that the gruesome killings follow the tropes of a teenage slasher flick, yet his attempt to predict and stop the next massacre only keep placing him in the role of villainous monster. Clever and sharp prose make this novel a most delicious guilty pleasure.
From the New York Times bestselling horror writer comes a classic slasher story with a twist-perfect for fans of Riley Sager and Grady Hendrix.
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A small west Texas town driven by oil and cotton-and a place where everyone knows everyone else's business. So it goes for Tolly Driver, a good kid with more potential than application, seventeen, and about to be cursed to kill for revenge. Here Stephen Graham Jones explores the Texas he grew up in, the unfairness of being on the outside, through the slasher horror he lives but from the perspective of the killer,…
The struggle for land grants in New Mexico is forever now also the story of Reies Tijerina, a man of many labels—activist, Chicano rights trail blazer, rabblerouser, charlatan, criminal. When the US annexed New Mexico during the Mexican-American War of 1847, this brought waves of opportunistic and unscrupulous Anglos onto lands worked and owned collectively by the resident Mexican-Americans, known then as Hispanos, on centuries old titles granted to them by Spain. In the 1960s, Tijerina, an itinerant Evangelical pastor, was transformed from preacher to crusader during his sojourns through the impoverished communities of northern New Mexico, hearing accounts of how they had been swindled and forced off their land, ownership now with the politically connected and even the Federal government. I love this account of Tijerina’s saga that includes shootouts, the kidnapping of a judge, arrests, courtroom drama, international notoriety, and of course, more backstage political maneuvering to undermine his struggle.
"In the early summer of 1967 a small band of Spanish Americans raided the courthouse in a dusty town in New Mexico to publicize their claim that much of the land in the state had been stolen from their ancestors. The author, who happened to be in New Mexico at the time, was drawn into the events and set out to discover what had happened during the raid, why it had happened, the legitimacy of the raiders' claims, and what sort of person was their leader, Reies Tijerina."--Amazon
I love conspiracy theories but to appreciate them, you have to understand the time and circumstances of when they germinated and flourished. Outwardly, my novel is about Felix Gomez, an Iraq War veteran turned detective vampire. What does that have to do with history? Plenty. My protagonist’s undead condition is a metaphor for his wartime PTSD. Rocky Flats was a Colorado nuclear weapons facility, now decommissioned and dismantled, and the story provided a stage to discuss the Cold War and its aftermath, the shenanigans of the atomic munitions industry, throw in the Roswell UFO crash: all instances where government denials only stoke further suspicion. And there are nymphos.
