Customer Reviews

Indiahoma: Stories of Blues and Blessings

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If you were to cross Dostoyevsky and Hemingway you would arrive at something similar to the style of Ray Norsworthy. The stories contained in the book masterfully weave together to form a coherent novel of short stories about the small imaginary town of Indiahoma. It unpretentiously and unapologetically lays bare the cold hard world of small town Oklahoma.

Not much I can add to the other reviewers comments, really. Indiahoma's stories are a prime example of the short story form at its best. The characters are gritty, wise, colorful, and most importantly, real. If you enjoy stories with depth and power which get right down to the heart of all the various aspects of what it means to be human, then this is the book you should read.

Indiahoma is a fascinating portrait of small-town America...in all its glory and its pain. It is, without a doubt, one of the finest collections of short stories I've read. Ever. Gritty, real characters populate the town and you never know what's around the next corner. Mr. Norsworthy not only refuses to lead his readers down a primrose path, he's taken us so far off the path that we aren't sure we ever want to walk its predictable line again. From the first story, "Ifs and Buts, Candy and Nuts" the reader is hooked, completely immersed in the lives and deaths of this small community in rural Oklahoma and anxious to learn more about quirky characters like Crazy Ilan, the town lunatic, waving his Bible and spouting verse in the same breath as he curses the passersby; Lucas Moody, the car salesman, intent on ending his life as a Christmas present to himself; Axel Freedman, a Vietnam vet who tries to do the right thing with disastrous consequences...and so many others, each unique, each fascinating and each with a compelling story to tell.

Beautifully written, with images as vivid as an Oklahoma sunset, this book is a gift of insight into an overlooked and oft-forgotten but very real world. A treasure to be read and re-read and shared with friends. It leaves an indelible mark as will, I predict, its author.

For lovers of the short-story form, it's a real pleasure to come across a book as readable as this one. Norsworthy's prose sings and his plots sizzle, creating a page-turning impulse that leads the reader through a wild collection of characters, circumstances and and eventualities. Those who generally prefer novels will delight in the intertwining of the characters and locations from story to story. This is a gritty, realistic book that brings the past in direct conflict with the present, presenting jarring choices to the characters and a new understanding of America to the reader. Highly recommended.

A. Ray Norsworthy's debut, Indiahoma, is a connected collection of stories that touch the heart. Norsworthy draws the reader in with his colorful language and descriptions. This book was near-impossible for me to put down. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who values a good read.

Indiahoma, Stories Of Blues And Blessings is the best story collection I have read in over twenty years. It's Faulkner hipped to what's happening by Pynchon, McCarthy on a drunk with Milan Kundera in a deadend saloon in the sticks of Oklahoma. The characters are unforgettable, real, down in the dirt real, some of them vile, some of them noble, all of them formidable in their milieu. This is not the cutesy-pie cornpone Oklahoma of the silly Billie Lett's novel, Where The Heart Is. This is the Oklahoma where illegal Mexicans being transported in a truck are DOA from Mexico on Christmas Eve, where a drunken, wife-beating redneck is killed by the tree he has just felled, where his son becomes the town crazy, Crazy Ilan, a strange, messianic figure who spouts more truth during one of his insane rants than Billy Graham ever dreamed of in all his sermons. Indiahoma is the Oklahoma akin to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, where the color of the oppressed is more likely red than black, and as often as not, mixed with white, and where the aristocracy is made up of people Will Rogers obviously never met. But regardless of race, class, or creed, some of the lowest of the low characters in Indiahoma seek and find redemption, not the Christian idea of redemption, perhaps, but redemption infinitely more human (pun intended), measurable by the act or acts involved, convincing redemption even for a former Deadhead turned white trash preacher who molests a little girl. That is a feat most writers would wet their pants even thinking about trying.

If you're tired of the same wrung-out neuroses splish-splashed across the weepy, wimpy pages of the American psych-out-scape, read this book and be truly illuminated.

If you think the mind of Hunter S. Thompson's wild, take a little trip with A. Ray Norsworthy. Delving into the Oklahoma author's fiction is like reading Tom Bodett on an adrenalin rush x 100. I'll admit it, from the first short story I encountered, I was hooked. I'm an A. Ray Norsworthy junkie. I teach fiction writing for a prestigious program and sometimes use Norsworthy's work in my lectures--simply because he's that good. An excerpt from one of my lectures on dialogue:

A few very experienced writers manage, somehow, to get around the problem of dialect. They use their own unique brands of slang-language. There's got to be a flipside to every coin, right? On rare occasions dialect, for some strange reason, does work. A. Ray Norsworthy, author of INDIAHOMA: STORIES OF BLUES AND BLESSINGS, writes stunningly realistic and somehow UNcondescending dialect. I haven't got a clue why it works for him (still trying to figure it out). It just simply does. Maybe it's that Norsworthy writes dialogue that's so authentic it'd be a crime not to incorporate dialect. Maybe it's the grim, gritty humor contained in his stories, even the most sorrowfully poignant. Whatever he's doing, it works. And all I can say is it's more than likely a matter of learning and knowing the rules, then bending the (bleep) out of `em.

***

This is a writer who knows the ins and outs of giving good story. You can't help but love the characters he creates--from the drunken "Crazy Ilan," who "rants and raves" his own brand of curiously disgusting, yet on-the-mark wisdom, to Jack White Wolf, who's nearly gunned down by his religion-crazed aunt. Crazy Ilan hoots and hollers and dresses in mismatched pj's and manages to capture the reader's heart, even as he shouts depraved rap-rants or prances around in a soiled Santa hat one particularly fortuitous Christmas Eve. If you love fast-paced, emotionally in-depth fiction-if you just all-out worship at the altar of Stories that Take you Elsewhere-immerse yourself in this insanely triumphant collection of powerfully written tales.

If you are tired of old plotlines and predictable characters, this is a book for you. Ray has created a cast of characters filled with quirks and eccentricities that strike a chord in reality. The storylines are fresh, raw, believeable.

Mr. Norsworthy's stories illuminate beauty and wonder in one moment - and rip the breath from you over harsh realities the next.

I would define this collection as a MUST READ.

From the first page of this collection, the reader is drawn into a world peopled with characters who are brought vividly alive. Ray Norsworthy writes with understanding of human nature, its frailties, its strengths. In the first story, we are immersed in the life of a man who thinks he has nothing left to live for; in another, a woman whose decision will salvage someone else's life. Indiahoma provides us with a close-up look at the interiors of rich multidimensional characters. What the author gives us is a viewpoint on this world that ultimately sings of hope and redemption. To the age-old question about life - "Is this all there is?" - Indiahoma answers clearly, "Look deeper. There is much more."

From the first page of this collection, the reader is drawn into a world peopled with characters who are brought vividly alive. Ray Norsworthy writes with understanding of human nature, its frailties, its strengths. In the first story, we are immersed in the life of a man who thinks he has nothing left to live for; in another, a woman whose decision will salvage someone else's life. Indiahoma provides us with a close-up look at the interiors of rich multidimensional characters. What the author gives us is a viewpoint on this world that ultimately sings of hope and redemption. To the age-old question about life - "Is this all there is?" - Indiahoma answers clearly, "Look deeper. There is much more."