Dallas’s CRISTINA HENRIQUEZ has assembled a heart-stopping collection of stories set in Panama in her first book, COME TOGETHER, FALL APART. She hints at the nation’s poverty—overcrowded homes, ramshackle furniture—but doesn’t dwell on it, instead finding rich narratives in mundane events. Take the poignant “Ashes,” in which young Mireya is coping with the loss of her job, mother, and boyfriend, as well as with a senile father who has been drunk for as long as she can remember. Joy to her is fleeting, occasioned by a poem or a once-in-a-lifetime steakhouse dinner; grief is just another burden. But she safeguards the memories—her mother’s zest for politics and how she named Mireya after the president—that sustain her. Henríquez’s writing is vibrant, her affecting portraits of Panama’s young women ultimately a celebration of humanity, with all its flaws. Reviewed by Mike Shea
Everyday life is a complicated thing, and with his finely nuanced novel CHALLENGER PARK, Austinite (and Texas Monthly contributing editor) STEPHEN HARRIGAN makes it clear that the glamour boys and girls of NASA don’t handle the slings and arrows any better than the rest of us. Case in point: Lucy Kincheloe—astronaut, mother of two, and wife of a (quite temperamental) fellow space jockey. When Lucy finally gets a shuttle assignment, she finds herself fretting over the more-than-collegial attentions of team leader Walt Womack. There’s barely time for an awkward encounter before she’s blasted into orbit—a competent pro but with nerve ends now exposed like frayed wires. Challenger Park is epic in scope but human in scale, a tale of grand adventure packed with individual emotions. This is incomparable twenty-first-century fiction from one of Texas’s great authors. Reviewed by Mike Shea
DEMON THEORY, we’re told at the outset, is STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES’s “three-part novelization” of a fictitious film trilogy, adapted from a best-seller “inspired by the case notes of Dr. Neider,” as originally published in the journal P/Q, as . . . well, you get the idea. The conceit is fairly audacious, but Jones, an unapologetic pop-culture savant, seizes the opportunity to recast thriller clichés into a madly entertaining landmark of literary horror. The text is chockablock with cheeky high- and lowbrow references (such as a car radio with a handwritten “11” on the volume knob, à la Spinal Tap). Best of all, Jones’s wryly expansive footnotes comment with mock-academic vigor on the story’s gore-filled antecedents, caroming from Creepozoids to The Dating Game to Black Sabbath (known, we’re told, as Polka Tulk in the late sixties). Demon Theory is subversive and indispensable—there is genius at work here. Reviewed by Mike Shea
As one of Texas’s most prolific writers (thirty-plus works), the author of the best-selling China Bayles mystery books is still going strong: This month’s Bleeding Hearts makes fourteen in the herbalist sleuth series.
Does China Bayles still surprise you?
She certainly surprised me—surprised herself too—in this book, with the discovery of a half-brother. Series books present an interesting challenge to the writer. I’ve chosen to write a series in which the central characters grow and change, so I come to each book with the expectation that the mystery will show me some new part of her.
Can you envision a time when you retire her or even kill her off?
Like Conan Doyle and Sherlock? Push her over the falls because I get tired of her? I don’t think so. I’d miss her.
You’re originally from Illinois but have lived in the Austin area for almost 35 years now. You feeling like a Texan yet?
I still don’t know how a Texan feels, exactly. It’s a big state, lots of different kinds of Texans here. Every time I write about a corner of it or go someplace I haven’t been before, I find a different kind of Texas. Reviewed by Mike Shea
My Library
