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Casey's Reviews > Desert Gothic
Desert Gothic
by Don Waters (Goodreads Author)
by Don Waters (Goodreads Author)
Desert Gothic, Don Waters's Iowa Short Fiction Award winning debut collection (2007), has been on my shelf for quite some time. Had I known I was going to enjoy so much, I would have read it much sooner.
The ten stories in Desert Gothic are set in the southwest, mostly in and around Nevada, and the sense of place in these stories is very strong. You get the sense that the characters would be different people if they lived in different place, and I think that's one of the marks of how well a writer uses a particular setting.
Waters's stories are also full of great characters in interesting situations - that's really the easiest way to describe the collection. For example, the excellent opening story, "What to Do with the Dead," is about an artist who works at a crematorium out in the desert and has to deliver ashes/remains to the deceased's next of kin; in "Mr. Epstein and the Dealer," a man, only known as "the dealer" travels to Mexico every month to buy large quantities of pharmaceuticals and smuggles them across the border to sell to elderly people at retirement homes; "The Bulls of San Luis," is about a dying man who works as a pick-up man in an illegal immigrant border-crossing operation; and in "Mormons in Heat," an irreverent, recently-divorced thirty year-old LDS convert is paired up with nineteen year-old for their respective missions, only Eli, the convert, is only interested in escaping his life for an "all-expenses-paid" two year vacation and sleeping with women on the road. I don't want my too-brief, over-simplified summaries of these stories to give you the wrong idea: Waters's stories are more than just clever scenarios. They're well crafted, and they expertly walk the very difficult line between funny and serious, particularly in a story like "Mormons in Heat."
There were a couple of stories I didn't care as much for, but all in all, this collection is good. If you are interested in the American southwest specifically, or regionalism more generally, then I'd check this collection out.
For more, see my blog: http://thestoryisthecure.blogspot.com/
The ten stories in Desert Gothic are set in the southwest, mostly in and around Nevada, and the sense of place in these stories is very strong. You get the sense that the characters would be different people if they lived in different place, and I think that's one of the marks of how well a writer uses a particular setting.
Waters's stories are also full of great characters in interesting situations - that's really the easiest way to describe the collection. For example, the excellent opening story, "What to Do with the Dead," is about an artist who works at a crematorium out in the desert and has to deliver ashes/remains to the deceased's next of kin; in "Mr. Epstein and the Dealer," a man, only known as "the dealer" travels to Mexico every month to buy large quantities of pharmaceuticals and smuggles them across the border to sell to elderly people at retirement homes; "The Bulls of San Luis," is about a dying man who works as a pick-up man in an illegal immigrant border-crossing operation; and in "Mormons in Heat," an irreverent, recently-divorced thirty year-old LDS convert is paired up with nineteen year-old for their respective missions, only Eli, the convert, is only interested in escaping his life for an "all-expenses-paid" two year vacation and sleeping with women on the road. I don't want my too-brief, over-simplified summaries of these stories to give you the wrong idea: Waters's stories are more than just clever scenarios. They're well crafted, and they expertly walk the very difficult line between funny and serious, particularly in a story like "Mormons in Heat."
There were a couple of stories I didn't care as much for, but all in all, this collection is good. If you are interested in the American southwest specifically, or regionalism more generally, then I'd check this collection out.
For more, see my blog: http://thestoryisthecure.blogspot.com/
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