The Sinaloa Story [Hardcover]

Barry Gifford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 7, 1998

Few writers have explored the margins of our world with the insight and understanding of Barry Gifford, and his newest novel takes him to the border and beyond, with a cast of characters who come straight out of the darkest corners of the imagination. Ava Varazo, a beautiful woman from a small village in Mexico, works in a brothel in the border town of La Paz, Arizona. When one of her customers, DelRay Mudo, a motorcycle mechanic from Guadelupe, falls in love with her, Ava seizes the chance to change her life. Indio Desacato, a rich racketeer from Sinaloa, Texas, is enamored of Ava and has asked her to be the queen of his own house. Desacato, Ava tells DelRay, brags that he never keeps less than half a million dollars, in cash, at his mansion. DelRay, whose own future holds no great promise outside of Ava, agrees to go to Sinaloa with her. They kill Desacato together, but Ava abandons DelRay-as she had planned all along- and disappears with the loot. DelRay tracks her down to her home in Mexico, but Ava is no longer the woman she was in La Paz, and DelRay finds himself unexpectedly caught between a campesino revolution and a pair of assassins. Expertly shifting between the tender and the terrifying, Barry Gifford has written a book that leaves both our nerves, and our minds, on an electrifying edge.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Employing a strange and bountiful cast of characters, The Sinaloa Story bobs and weaves as if challenging the reader to follow a spectacular, if often incoherent, narrative. This is no small task, considering the action rolls at a page-turning clip and reads like a noir film treatment in which characters are ushered in and out of the plot with the speed and finality of a high-caliber slug. The story line, such as it is, revolves around DelRay Mudo, a dim-witted mechanic who falls hard for Ava Varazo, a stunning and scheming prostitute who easily beguiles him into helping her rob her pimp of $500,000, part of which belongs to Mr. Nice, a notorious mob boss. When Ava quickly dumps DelRay (and locks him in the trunk of his car) then splits with the cash, this development comes as no surprise. When she heads to Mexico to join a guerilla band known as the Countless Raindrops, however, an unforeseen and intriguing twist begins. This twist abruptly unravels into a bizarre tangle of events which are connected to previous episodes by only the thinnest of threads. The result is a darkly exhilarating and scattershot ride in which kidnapping, murder, amnesia, and prophetic dreams abound, as do colorful personalities with memorable names such as Cobra Box, Ruby Ponds Cure, Thankful Priest, and Cairo Fly.

To say the book is nonlinear is putting it mildly; the only thing some of these vignettes have in common is that they happen to be contained within the same book. But Gifford has a knack for creating electrifying, grainy snapshots of subterranean life, pulling defining moments into vivid focus while leaving the background mired in shadow and mystery. The characters are not deep, but they are rich, and even those who appear for only a paragraph or two are memorable, adding much to the setting, if not the plot.

As might be expected of one who has written screenplays for (Wild at Heart) and with (Lost Highway) David Lynch, Barry Gifford paints hypnotic dreamscapes in which the atmosphere is the driving force behind the narrative. Those searching for a seamless, let alone believable, story will be left shaking their heads, but those willing to suspend reality and embrace even the most outlandish coincidences and tattered loose ends will enjoy the staccato dialogue, gritty detail, and oddly appealing cast in this eerie joy ride along the dark fringes of America. --Shawn Carkonen

From Publishers Weekly

Once again, Gifford (Baby Cat-Face, 1995, etc.) depicts protagonists trying to make a brighter life for themselves while betraying lovers and staying one step ahead of homicidal maniacs. When former motorcycle mechanic DelRay Mudo joins up with Ava Varazo, a beautiful but dangerous prostitute, she convinces him to "do something meaningful with his life." In this case, something meaningful involves stealing half a million dollars from Indio Desacato, owner of a thriving bordello in the Texas border town of Sinaloa. Standing in their way is Indio's 380-pound bodyguard, Thankful Priest, a former football player who once gouged out his own eyeball while high on various narcotics. What Ava really wants is to return to her Mexican home of La Villania ("the despicable act") and fund a peasant's revolution, a plan that doesn't necessarily include DelRay. After the showdown at Indio's, the narrative switches to Leander Rhodes, an ex-Marine, and his young wife, Cobra Box, who travel to La Villania to join the revolution. Also in the mix are a white supremacist, a boarding school-educated Italian hooker and a cross-dressing 14-year-old piano player. Like Sailor and Lula of Gifford's previous novels (including Wild at Heart), Delray and Ava can't avoid the violence that surrounds them (nor do they always want to), but, in Gifford's hands, their troubles are elevated to a gritty, visceral poetry of the marginalized.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1ST edition (May 7, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151002495
• ISBN-13: 978-0151002498
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 6.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,834,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reptilian Saturday Nite Sex & Violence Stomp, July 9, 2003

By 

James Paris "Tarnmoor" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sinaloa Story ("Rebel Inc") (Paperback)

Whoa! There's a lot going on here in paucas palabras. We're in one of those border nightmares where Texas, Arizona, and Mexico all ooze together into some kind of sharp southwestern guisado with enough lard and chiles to singe your lips and leave a brownish cloud around your cabeza. Add jeans that are too tight, old cars, bad norteno music, and chicas that are muy guapa and hot to trot -- and you get Barry Gifford, the Sage of Big Tuna, at his very best.

I've seen David Lynch's WILD AT HEART and LOST HIGHWAYS, both based on Gifford books, but straight Gifford hits you right upside the gut with a haymaker.

The hot relationship between DelRay Mudo and Ava Varazo is interrupted when the latter blows away her pimp, Indio Desacato, and runs off to La Villania (Nasty), Mexico, to take up with an obscure political cause. Everything goes to hell when Cobra Box, her associate, goes to Bad Leopard, Idaho, to buy guns. Nobody ultimately gets together with anybody: just overheated bodies caroming around in a ranchero beat with the occasional gratuitous sex or violence. As Cairo Fly put it in his diary that closes the book, "Is it possible for a person's soul to stray away or be stolen and without it the person has no peace in their heart? I feel I am one of those now."

There is something mesmerizing about Gifford's staccato chapters. Try too hard to follow the story, and you wind up like Thankful Priest with a bullet in your head in some godforsaken south of the border hellhole. No, man, just keep going to the beat. Sometimes, you fall off the edge of the world; sometimes you get good Tequila with your chilaquiles.

I've got to get me some more of those Gifford books -- if this one's any indicator.