GLCA New Writers Award winner
This powerful debut collection, set in the light-filled deserts of Nevada and Arizona, introduces a darkly inventive new voice. Like an early Richard Ford, Don Waters writes with skill, empathy, and an edgy wit of worlds not often celebrated in contemporary literature. In Desert Gothic, Waters unleashes a wild and gritty cast and points them down paths of reckoning, where the characters earn the grace of their hard-won wisdom.
Set in bars, mortuaries, nursing homes, truck stops, and the 鈥減overty motels that encircled downtown鈥檚 casino corridor,鈥 Waters鈥檚 ten stories are full of misfit transients like Julian, a crematorium worker who decorates abandoned urns to create a 鈥渓ush underground island,鈥 and the instant Mormon missionary Eli, a hapless divorc茅 who 鈥渁lways likes people better when they鈥檙e a little broken.鈥
Limo drivers, ultra-marathoners, vagabonds, and a distraught novelist-to-be populate the pages of these gritty stories.
"In this remarkable collection of stories, Don Waters presents ten lives that epitomize the journey toward volition in the face of frustration, absurdity and, realistically or metaphorically, the Nevada desert landscape itself."鈥The Virginia Quarterly Review
鈥淗ere are ten beautifully rendered worlds, ten opportunities for the reader to be transformed. You鈥檒l want to own a 铿乺st edition of Desert Gothic. It will only go up in value as Don Waters鈥檚 career soars. He鈥檚 the real deal.鈥濃擩ohn McNally, author, The Book of Ralph and America鈥檚 Report Card
鈥淒on Waters writes with an uncompromising eye about the slyly grim yet fascinating journeys of characters who long ago decided they鈥檝e had enough of second chances. They hold on at the sunburnt edges of Nevada and Arizona, somewhere just beyond the madness of tract home boomtowns and senior citizen communities merely waiting rooms for death, out there just barely still in range of the tinny noise of casinos. In Waters鈥檚 splendid stories, these are the last places left where they can grip, fast, to the persevering essences of humanity.鈥濃擠ouglas Unger, author, Leaving the Land and Looking for War and Other Stories
鈥淒on Waters locates the decency in the undersung. He does a brilliant job of showing the small heroic acts that reverberate in the lives of his characters and in the mind of a reader. The stories are very much of the moment: a man helps workers across the Mexican border into the United States; another makes monthly trips to Mexico to buy cut-rate prescription drugs for the elderly. But there is nothing slickly trendy about these stories, rather an understanding of life in this region and, as Stephen Dobyns wrote, 鈥榟ow to like it.鈥欌濃擜my Hempel, author, The Collected Stories
鈥淭he prose in this wonderful collection of stories is as sneaky as the landscape it depicts. It is also as harsh and as beautiful. The characters here are weird and remarkably drawn. I read these stories with much pleasure.鈥濃擯ercival Everett
鈥淒esert Gothic is a brilliant book. On this guided tour of the American southwest鈥攖hink of a buzzed and sunburned Virgil in shades, blue jeans, boots that kicked a man nearly to death鈥擠on Waters takes us through heaven and hell and most of the stops in between, and does it with an abiding compassion for his people which does not, however, keep bad things from happening to them. Desert Gothic is a trip鈥攊n as many senses of the word as you care to infer鈥攁nd marks the debut of a powerful young writer with much to say and the literary chops to make it stick.鈥濃擝en Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
