Customer Reviews

The Southern Cross: Stories

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I got an advanced copy of this book, which won the Bakeless Prize, judged by Antonya Nelson. I dig her work a lot, so I read Southern Cross with relish. The stories here are set in LA, MS and north Florida, and the first thing you notice is how Horack gets everything right--the trees, tides, fish, food, accents and pickups. He's a lot like Rick Bass in that way--the atmosphere is always pitch-perfect. I lived in Louisiana for a few years, and this collection really transported me. The real feat of this book is the people, though. Horack specializes in working class, hardscrabble men who try to eek out existences off the land. Their dreams are muted, and all the more powerful for it: A bear's gall bladder holds the key to freedom from a suffocating family; a fish-tracking tag might reunite a man with his estranged girl; a submerged cypress tree might return a man's lost history. Personally, I think the main reason to read a short-story collection is to get variations on a theme, and here Horack shows great range. His narrators are men women, young and old--he's deft at bringing forth utterly compelling characters, regardless of class, color or age. So while the themes of this book focused tightly on Southern outliers who get a last shot at meaningful connection, the range of the book is huge: aristocrats, beekeepers, bible girls, Gulf war vets, rabbit skinners, lawyers, murderers and on and on. Pull Southern Cross off the bookstore shelf and read the exquisite story "The High Place I Go" and I promise you'll go home with this book in your back pocket.

As a native of Louisiana who has not lived there for 25 years, this book took me there immediately. I "knew" these people, their voices, the places. But that's only part of the allure of this book. Each story is its own oyster - complete. The characters are so well-drawn and believeable. They stayed with me for much longer than is usual with short stories.

This is a book to be savored.

Having spent only a few weeks in N'awlins, these stories spoke to me with an unmistakable southern accent. The places feel real for good reason-they clearly resemble their namesakes. But the best thing about these stories is the people, the characters. Horack inflates them with life, and not a life from behind the confines of a white picket fence. Horack's characters have a raw intensity that will captivate the reader. I had to pace myself to keep from reading the entire selection in one sitting; I wanted to savor these stories. No doubt my eyes will graze these pages again and discover even more than I already have.

These stories are told from spring through summer, fall, and winter. They explore life, youth, love, passion, disappointment, and death. The southern reader will find an alarmingly authentic glimpse into their neighbor's lives, and the rest of us will get a taste of a world often misunderstood and mislabeled. Skip Horack is a writer who will forever be on my must read list-I look forward to reading many fine stories from him in the future.

Regionalism often finds its mode in the pastoral, and in the American South, the South of the Lousiana and Mississippi Gulf Coasts, the South of bayous and piney swamp lands, not Faulkner's savage wilderness or William Gay's Faulknerian dystopia, but the South of Tim Gautreaux and Walker Percy at his most lyrical - zydeco to stark delta blues - this has meant a kind of aching tenderness, a diffident case for the region's beauty.

In his superb debut collection, winner of the 2008 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize, Skip Horack paints the landscape of Southern Lousiana with a poet's feeling for language and an intimate knowledge of people and place. The Louisiana Horack creates is both generative and broken, salvific and ruined, marked in ways large and small, by Hurricane Katrina.

Into this landscape comes a varied cast of characters who are by turns indifferent to it, at odds with it, dependant on it for livelihood and renewal. There are no stories I have read which capture better the complexity of the relationship of the people of this region between work and life, land and self, the risks and abundance of life still lived close to the land. The best stories here convey this relationship in prose which renders the blurring between self and place sensually palpable, an intimacy which makes the moments of violence in that relationship viscerally jarring, and the scope and depth of loss from Katrina immediately felt.

In "Rabbit Man," a widower who lives in a "Gaza Strip of Cajuns wedged between the Union Pacific line and the settlements of the Opelousas black majority" faces the loss of his breeding stock from "a plague" of calicivirus, a highly contagious and deadly upper-respiratory disease. "Little Man" weaves a small-time beekeeper's consideration of a buyout offer from a larger farmer with the story of the beekeeper's caretaking of his senile father. "Caught Fox" is both the story of a fox trap gone awry and a feckless weekend father's day with his dying son. With Chekhovian detatchment, in two short pages, "Chores" reveals its main character through an afternoon of work. Each of these stories shows its protagonist through what they do - the businesses of setting a fox hole trap, of mowing a lawn, of harvesting pure tupelo honey, of how to kill rabbits mercifully - and this work illuminates their lives with astonishing psychological depth and sensitvity.

Katrina makes her appearance most clearly in "The Redfish," the story of an ex-con who ends up riding out the storm in a mobile home, and who attains in its telling the stature of a folk hero - John Brown, Stagger Lee, in the world of Charley Patton's "High Water Blues." The storm is also there, more subtly, in "The Journeyman," when a young black girl, a Cassandra figure, another familiar character of Southern folklore, warns the white adult narrator that "God and Jesus" are "gonna punish this city soon enough," in "Visual of a Sparrow" told from the point of view of a young black woman displaced from the Ninth Ward, and in other, fainter echoes of how the storm has marked the land and the people who depend on it for their livelihood.

In many stories, violence erupts from this landscape, unexpectedly, inevitably. A bird-watching expedition in "Visual of a Sparrow" ends with an act of sudden aggression which flushes out, literally, a small, hidden treasure, in contrast with the static rows of FEMA trailers at its start, a moment which brings the racial and class tensions beneath the story's surface brilliantly into focus, a complex moment, as in many of these stories, in which the old and new Souths overlap. "Borderlands," which starts with a murder and the discovery of a young girl's corpse, makes literal the violence beneath the surface of this landscape, but the apotheosis of the story, and in a way, of the whole collection, comes toward the end, in an indelible scene of abundance, and brutality:

A battered harvester mowed the standing cane down by the row, and a tractor drawing a high-sided trailer kept time, collecting the blur of billet that dropped from the elevator.... The boys ... fanned out along the highway armed with clubs and pellet guns and broken asphalt. Behind the harvester a hundred egrets worked the cut field, chicken-scratching the stubble for field mice and lizards.

As the fifth row fell, they came. Rabbits - cottontails and swampers both - exploded from the blackened cane, darting across the highway for the shelter of a new green field. The boys went serious and clubbed what they could as the smallest child moved among them, dispatching the wounded rabbits with six pumps on his rusty Benjamin and a point-blank headshot.

This is not the South of Tim Gautreaux's stories, of stylized cajuns in the fictional Grand Crapeaud parish. What The Southern Cross sometimes lacks in comparison to Gautreaux's expert dramatic timing, it more than compensates for in the richness of its portraiture. With perceptiveness and deep intelligence, Horack inhabits a stunning range of characters, young and old, male and female, black and white, and shows them entwined with each other, and inseparable from where they live.

This collection's real achievement is its depiction of a human as well as physical landscape. The tight-lipped, deadpan wit used to protect secrets in small communities, the jokes that are not quite jokes and not quite serious, the evasions and elipses of speech in this world are conveyed with a pitch-perfect ear, and Horack makes its particular emotional entanglements - between a disaffected teen and his uncle, between a young man and the wife of his brother in prison, between an aging "swamp rat ... stuck to the old ways" and an itenerant Mexican laborer - intimately real.

The Southern Cross marks the arrival of an important new writer, not only a Southern writer, but an American one. The landscape of these stories is our own, the people in it, faces we pass on the highway, or hidden in fisheries and farms and crab-picking plants, uniquely American. Horack gives them a voice. We should all sit up and take notice.

The Southern Cross

This is one of the best books of short stories I have ever read...

Far too often, stories about the south end up as imitations of what we've all seen before, or worse, they belittle or make fun of the people who live there. Character becomes caricature. But not here. Skip Horack's stories are human and real and funny and beautiful and painful and touching. The stories are about people. The people just happen to live in the south.