Valleyesque Stories

Flores takes to the elusive and dangerous borderland in his inventive debut collection (after the novel Tears of the Trufflepig). In "Queso," a man interviews for a job at a fast food outlet, where he is rewarded for providing folksy details that testify to his authentic "Mexican" identity. The story sets the tone for the remarkable range on exhibit throughout, from surrealism to prescience. In "The Science Fair Protest," gangsters take over a school, and biology teacher Ram calls on his neighbor, the narrator, for help navigating the new teaching methods mandated by the gangsters. Flores seamlessly blends high and low references as Ram and the narrator get drunk and commiserate about the changes at the school while also listening to records by "the Mexican Neil Diamond" and discussing Proust and the Dreyfuss Affair. In "Nocturne from a World Concave," the composer Frédéric Chopin gets into a philosophical debate about the nature of reality in Ciudad Juárez. "Zapata Foots the Bill" involves a muralist attempting to accurately portray the legendary revolutionary, but viewers are disinterested or outright confused. The standout "The Oswald Variations" offers a hilarious and remarkable alternate history of a young Lee Harvey Oswald as an aspiring musician in Texas. Using a blend of experimentation and magical realism, this conveys the border's many sociopolitical shades. The zany set pieces add up to a work with explosive substance. (May)

Bizarre short stories from a Texan with a punk-rock heart. Austin author Flores' first two books, Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas (2018) and Tears of the Trufflepig (2019), have already made him something of a cult favorite among readers who appreciate his frequently funny, almost always bizarre punk-rock sensibilities. His new collection is set in the same off-kilter world as his previous works, but it also expands on it. In "You Got It, Take It Away," named after the legendary Tejano singer Johnny Canales' catchphrase, a Mexican American man encounters his difficult, probably racist neighbor, who shows him a mysterious piece of cloth that defies the laws of the natural world. When he asks about it later, the neighbor becomes belligerent, convinced the man had broken into his apartment. The story ends on a surprisingly sweet note--Flores doesn't sacrifice compassion for the sake of weirdness. "The 29th of April" is grounded more firmly in reality--painfully so. The narrator chronicles the descent of a town into gang violence: "The reporters stopped coming when we started finding them dead," the narrator reflects. The story is told mostly in one long paragraph, giving it an exhausting kind of urgency; it's both beautiful and intensely heartbreaking. All the stories here are excellent, but the best is perhaps "Pheasants," in which a coffee shop worker named Tito Papel encounters an angel stuffing their face with a discarded piece of birthday cake; Tito asks them to leave, but they keep coming back, and the two banter good-naturedly about language and theology. The cake-loving spirit denies they're Tito's guardian angel, but the ending suggests they might have been playing it coy. Flores' prose is a delight throughout the book, and his love for the unearthly always feels natural, never self-conscious. One character reflects, "Strange stories had helped me give meaning to the painful moments of survival, and strange stories were the only things I could continue feeding into the machine." Could that be Flores' own manifesto? Whether it is or not, his own strange stories are some of the best to come along in quite a while. This is an accomplished book from an author determined to keep literature weird. Tales from the Rio Grande Valley that are as beautiful as they are bizarre. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.