The title of Vicki Hendricks's recent short story collection, Florida Gothic Stories, is a bit of a misnomer. The stories may take place in Florida, but there isn't a whole lot of "gothic" going on. In fact, in a work that features, among other things, carnal relations with dolphins, unrequited lizard love, and monkey masturbation, a more accurate title might be Florida Freak Show. Hendricks doesn't limit the degeneracy to the animal kingdom, either. There is also plenty of human sexual assault and perversion. While there are times in these stories where the outlandish and macabre distract, especially in the pieces featuring bestiality, Hendricks never lets them take over a tale completely. At the heart of each of these eleven stories, there is an undeniable humanity, beating loud and clear.
            FGS's strongest selection is "Sinny and the Prince," which first apeared in the (unfortunately) now-defunct noir lit mag, Murdaland. Classic hardboiled noir transplated to modern-day, sunny Palm Beach, "Sinny" features sleazy pornography producers, conspiring strippers, and of course plenty of double-dealing. The story centers on Cindy, a down-and-out, separated identical twin living in New Orleans, who calls herself "Sinny" (get it?). Her sister, Lydia, was sold to a wealthy lawyer when she was a child and thus spared Sinny's hellish fate of life with a heroin-addicted mother. While Lydia enjoyed the spoils of recitals and ballet in Palm Beach, Sinny suffered the slings of prostitution, abuse, and abandonment. When Hurricane Katrina nets Sinny a meager payday, she hires a PI to find her well-off sister, with big plans to even the score. Of course, this being noir, nothing goes as planned.
            Sinny narrates her tale in a convincing southern trailer park vernacular, in a voice that sucks you in and doesn't let go. And though the good girl of privilege versus the bad girl of necessity could be rendered stock in lesser hands, Hendricks's writing is so crisp, so authentic, she elevates the work above cliché, and what we're left with is the simple story of a hardluck loser stuck in a  desperate situation, overmatched but refusing to surrender.
            In a cutting final line, Sinny states, defiantly, "I slug the Glenlivet, feel the burn. Suicide is not in our genes."
            This is a major theme of Hendricks's collection: defiance in the face of insurmountable odds. She fills her stories with ne'er-do-wells who can't seem to get it right no matter how hard they try, but they keep right on trying (a prevailing theme of noir, in general).
            In "Stormy, Mon Amour," another successful selection, Hendricks applies the noir methodology to the absurd, in a piece about interspecies love between a dolphin and an abused wife/single mother named Cherie. For all the oddities of a story where a woman plots revenge against the abusive men in her life to be with her dolphin lover, one line elevates the work above the peculiarity of its details.
           When her world starts crashing around her, Cherie champions her missteps; she owns and celebrates them, confiding boldly, "I made a big mistake. But I did a damn good job of it."
           Forget the background of a hurricane looming, forget the money that needs to be stolen in order to give her child a fighting chance—and, yes, forget that a woman is having sexual intercourse with a dolphin. Cherie, like so many of Hendricks's characters, is brutally honest. And she is tough. We buy the absurdity of "Stormy, Mon Amour" because we buy her.
           This isn't to say that there aren't times where the weirdness distracts. In "Must Bite," a story about a man who keeps pet chimps, an exotic dancer constructs a murder-by-monkey plot. Hendricks needlessly goes overboard with the sex and violence, and the shock factor of primate rape in its gruesome climax is too much. Which is a shame. Because the story would've worked just as well—and probably better—without it.
            These missteps, however, are few and far, and given the overall strength of Florida Gothic Stories they prove eminently forgiveable.

Joe Clifford's work has appeared in Big Bridge, Bryant Literary Review, the Connecticut Review, Dark Sky, Fringe, Hobart, Opium, Thuglit, and Word Riot, among others. He serves as producer of Lip Service West, a reading series in Oakland, CA. Learn more at   www.joeclifford.com.

           In Connie May Fowler's sixth novel, Clarissa Burden uses the heat and light of the summer solstice as rocket fuel. Just after 7 a.m. on June 21, 2006, she begins to realize that her verbally and financially abusive artist husband has caused her seemingly terminal writer's block, nearly "stealing her soul." Two hundred and seventy-eight pages and twenty-four hours later, just before 7 a.m. on June 22, she lands safely on the air mattress of the World's Smallest Human Cannonball.
            North Florida's geography, history, weather, flora and fauna are as important (and interesting) as the humans who populate How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly. The action takes place in and around the "malarial crossroads named Hope, Florida," a fictional town in fictional Aucilla County, "bordered on all sides by swamp and forest." Fictional places like Black Hole Slough, Bread of Life Way, Lake Prohibition, Robber's Roost, Mosquito Swamp Trail, Jake's Hell, Dead Oak, and Tremble and Shout Road coexist with real places like Sopchoppy and Mashes Sands and Tallahassee.
            The sun takes center stage, "so intense, the asphalt appeared unstable, as if Florida's legendary heat had transmuted the road into a river of molten black lava." A neighbor decides to "wander in the street, egg in hand, and fry it just for the bragging rights." Lists of plants become prose poetry: "[M]agnolia, dogwood, cabbage palm, and loblolly pine, which in turn craeted a shelter for blackberry, deerberry, bracken fern, and more." Lists of fauna equate people and animals: "foxes, bears, bobcats, pileated woodpeckers, redneck farmers, black farmers, and old hippies."
            The book's characters are pure North Florida—Trash Man, Cracker Bandit, Miss Lossie, Raul the car salesman, the postmistress in her pink lace bra, Eunice Butler, owner of the Old Florida Magnolia Inn, and itinerant dwarfs. Fowler isn't making fun of these characters, she's reveling in them: "These were just folks, making a living, talented, brave, hungry, mischievous, petty, kind, gentle, good, mean, evil, silly, serious, tired, hopeful, scared, longing, confused, arrogant, jealous, wise: the human condition in all its frail and glorious fuckery."
           By evening, Clarissa sits in the parking lot of a Sonic restaurant outside Tallahassee with her former student and potential lover, Leo Adams, "whose jeans fit the way orange peels fit fruit," in town for a public library event called "Meet Florida's Up-and-Coming Writers." Clarissa has discovered a research paper, likely by a student at FAMU, that tells the story of Olga Villada, a Spanish woman, and her common-law husband, Amaziah Archer, who in 1823 built Clarissa's house. Clarissa and Leo read to each other between bites of burgers and fries and plastic-cup sips of Cabernet, learning that until 1821, Florida was governed by Spanish law, which made slavery illegal and allowed women to own property. The research paper tells a compelling story of its own, and if there is any danger of its bogging down Clarissa's story, the heat generated by her attraction to Adams keeps things moving.
           Fowler cuts the dark with the light throughout the book. From the fly (in its living and apparitional versions) that is in love with Clarissa, to the ghosts of women and children who rescue Clarissa in the yellow jack (malaria) graveyard, to the fallen angel tree trimmer and the ghosts who inhabit her house, we are privy to the thoughts and voices of even more characters, including some in Clarissa's head. A "made-to-order Deepak" Chopra urges self-acceptance with admonitions like "embrace the butt, my friend." A (Floridian) Greek chorus referred to by the narrator as Clarissa's ovarian shadow women, with voices that range from Peggy Lee and Christiane Amanpour to The Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West and Ethel Merman, sings Clarissa's emotions.
            It is an understatement to say that there is a lot going on here. Fowler risks giving us vertigo with a strobe light. But it doesn't happen because every detail clicks, "lines up," as Clarissa might say. I recommend this book to any reader, but especially to writers, who might want to place above their desks what Leo Adams remings Clarissa: "I'm trying to say that you have to risk being scared again. Isn't that what you told that room full of wannabe writers the day we met? That writing wasn't for the faint of heart? That it was scary and it hurt and it welled up from the most dangerous and injured places in our fucking souls?"

Angela Kelsey lives in Miami Shores. She is working on a memoir, and blogs at angelakelsey.com.

           The world is rife with temptation for a Jesus Boy the likes of Elwyn Parker, sixteen, member of the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters, Miami branch. Although the congregation's "faithful" disdain the Holy Rollers as inferior, they welcome "Holy Spirit descending" demonstrations that require church ushers to "rush . . . and drape the velvet shawl over  . . . spasming legs, hiding what would otherwise be revealed" in the case of moved-by-the-spirit females. Church pianist/musical whiz Elwyn plays boogie-woogie/gospel as if he had "thirty fingers" and spends his non-church time proselytizing, fasting, and trying to stay "Strong in the Lord."
           Trying being the operative word.
           Into every enclave of devoutness comes a fleshly disturbance, and that disturbance for Elwyin is SIster Elaine Morrisohn. She's older (by 26 years)—a problem for Elwyn's family but not much of one for Elwyn. ("I saw no imperfections.") She's a sexual dynamo—definitely not a problem for Elwyn.  But: she drinks and she smokes (against church doctrine). And: "before she had accepted the Lord, of course," Elaine got her ears pierced. Twice. Wearing jewelry is another church no-no.
           There are other, larger complications working against the couple. Morrisohn is the widow of Elwyn's patron saint, Brother Buford Morrisohn, the man who bought him a (second-hand) piano and a (second-hand) car.  When she was younger, Elaine ran with the wild pack that included Elwyin's father, Roscoe Parker. When she was very young, sexually abused by her father, she gave birth to a son who believes he's her brother.
           The woman has history.
           Present day, she's clingy.
           When Elwyn goes off on scholarship to the University of Florida, bypassing Bible College, she calls him a lot. Drunken, jealous phone calls. Regardless, Elwyn Parker loves Elaine Morrisohn. And keeps loving her through marriage to another woman, the birth of his son, the discovery of a half brother, Elaine's illness and death.
           Love has its work cut out for it in Jesus Boy, but in fact love is the true religion preached in its pages. One of the novel's ambitions is to make us love believers, too.
           Struggling alongside Elwyn to uphold church-delegated standards of righteousness are his Gran'ma Mamie Cooper, his father Roscoe, and his best friend Peachie. Like the rest of the novel's supporting cast, these three fall short of the holiness bar. It's hard to be church-good. Beyond the demands and dictates of desire, there are these pesky impediments of family deception, outright lies, and generationally-protected secrets. It's another burden to bear, Elwyn decides: all those "people who have lived before you . . . you can never push past them because they were here before you. They know stuff . . . They know stuff about you that you don't even know. That is their world. . . . You just got here. They were living and breathing and loving and leaving before you were even born."
           Allen's touch is winningly light, but where there is hypocrisy, he outs it—in liaisons, in marriages, in the Church of Our Blessed Redeemer Who Walked Upon the Waters, in the used car business, in his characters. There are marvelously funny scenes with Elwyn and Mr. Byrd, his high school principal, first, as the harried principal tries to dissuade Elwyn from playing evagelist on school grounds and, later, when Elwyn returns as a substitute teacher. Compared with the unambitious, disrespectful students Mr. Byrd now has to contend with: "It was sure easier breaking up illegal Bible studies in the cafeteria," he ruefully admits. You can almost hear a chorus of high school principals shout "Amen!"
           Towards novel's end, Elwyn confesses he has "a difficult time believing in God anymore." And again, "I wasn't an atheist, but heaven just seemed so far away." But his friend Peachie sets him straight about priorities. It isn't piety that matters. It's something else. "Your life, in fact, is shit," Peachie tells him, "but you're still able to love."
           It's no small feat to write a South-based, religion-drenched novel that reads fresh, inventive, and true. Preston Allen has done it with Jesus Boy.

Kat Meads is the author of many books, including Little Pockets of Alarm, Born Southern and Restless, and when the dust finally settles, forthcoming from Ravenna Press. Learn more at www.katmeads.com

           Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country imagines the life of hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-whoring, hard-living, dead-eyed Everglades pioneer Edgar A. Watson, a historic figure. Mister Watson, Planter Watson, Emperor Watson, Desperado Watson, Bloody Watson, Killer Watson sired no fewer than 12 children by at least seven women, three of whom he married, at least four of whom he loved. More than 25 murders across 40 years were laid at Watson's feet, two of which he was tried for, at least three of which he conspired in and some number of which he likely committed. The evidence of his involvement in most is circumstantial.
            The 2008 National Book Award winner, Shadow Country, 892 pages, is an abridged re-presentation of three previous Matthiessen novels: Killing Mr. Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997) and Bone by Bone (1999). Meticulously researched, the story was a quarter century in the crafting. It is much more than an edit, with nearly 400 pages excised (the largest part from Lost Man's River), individual paragraphs and sentences re-crafted, lesser characters grown into greater ones. Nearly all the characters of Shadow Country are historical, the details of their lives real. It is almost impossible to distinguish where the historic record leaves off and Matthiessen's imaginings begin. Most of his speculation involves the deaths ascribed to Watson; Matthiessen supposes what might have been but cannot be known.
            The book begins and ends the same hour, the afternoon of Monday, October 24, 1910. In the aftermath of the Great Hurricane of 1910, the 55-year old Watson brings his motor skiff, Warrior, ashore by Ted Smallwood's Chokoloskee Island store, built atop an Indian shell mound where gulf and ‘Glades meet. He seeks to convince a pack of 20-some neighbors, mostly good folk, that he is not guilty of murdering two men (hog thief Green Waller and gunslinger Dutchy Melville) and a woman (Big Hannah) who had worked for him; indeed that he has done justice against their true killer, his in-law Leslie Cox. While his third wife—it is her 21st birthday—cowers with their two children beneath the store amid the stinking corpses of poultry drowned by the storm, his neighbors put 33 bullets and an uncounted number of shotgun loads in him. A key question of the story is whether the killing is self-defense or vigilante ambush. "A powerful, charismatic man is shot to pieces by his neighbors-why?" Matthiessen says in his Author's Note. "It is the why? that matters."
            Matthiessen roots his tale vividly in place. Watson's Everglades is presented as paradise and purgatory. Florida's flora and fauna, the iconic and less so, serve to reveal Watson, his world and the people around him. In potent but somewhat lesser degree Matthiessen crafts Arkansas, where Watson was imprisoned for horse theft, and the Oklahoma Territory, where he allegedly bushwhacked the outlaw queen Belle Starr; antebellum and reconstruction Edgefield County, South Carolina, where Watson was born; and Fort White ‘in the Suwannee River country of north Florida,' whence he flees under suspicion of murder at age 15, and where he is charged with murder some 35 years later.
           Matthiessen manipulates time and voice artfully. Book I moves from the killing back to Watson's arrival in the Everglades in 1892, then forward again to his burial in Fort Myers, hinting at violent doings in Watson's past. It is told in a rhythmic sequence of first person accounts by 12 of his friends, neighbors and relations, some of whom fired upon Watson that fateful day. In Book II, Watson's son Luke, a history professor, seeking to understand and hoping to exonerate his father, reconstructs Watson's personal history much as Matthiessen himself must have done, ferreting out details from Watson's childhood in South Carolina's Piedmont in the 1860s, then carrying forward past Watson's death to the effects of his life on those he touched, through Prohibition into the early days of the Great Depression. Book III gives Watson's first person account of his life, from birth to moment of death with insightful meanderings into his genetic and cultural antecedents. Watson descends from fiery Celtic Borderers, ‘a suspicious breed of feuders and avengers.' The son of a shrewish mother and an alcoholic and abusive father, ‘a poor relation of stern, prosperous kin,' and a child of the beaten, angry, resentful Confederacy, Watson lives a strange but strong code of honor, encompassing personal responsibility and enterprise, revenge and vendetta.
           Matthiessen is among other things, a master of voice-his novel Far Tortuga is written entirely in the dialect of Cayman Islanders. In Shadow Country, the varied voices of the backcountry ‘Glades, and the red clay Piedmont are especially earthy and ring true. Wary and defiant reconstruction-era African-Americans, servile slaves and servants, field hands, half-breed crackers, southern aristocracy, schoolmarms, hard-edged entrepreneurs, redneck sheriffs all speak here, each distinction subtle yet clear, melding eye-dialect and diction to imply origin and place and culture.
            Only briefly does Matthiessen enter the points of view of blacks and women, though he in Book I delves somewhat more deeply into the minds of ‘mulatters and half-breeds.' It seems a wise choice. He can describe their lot, but recognizes that he cannot really know them. The brutality of their existence is revealed almost exclusively through the harshness of their lives, how their destinies are ruled by the whims of white men around them, and through the racism demonstrated in the everyday thoughts and actions of common people.
Through the eyes of the storytellers Matthiessen unfolds the growth of Florida: the near-extinction of wild birds and alligators by plume and hide hunters, Key West wreckers, cattlemen, Spanish-American War profiteers, orange growers and sugar planters, sand-dredging roadbuilders and railroad men, swamp-selling hucksters, and the oily lawyers and politicians who enabled the worst of them. Again, from the Author's Note: "...it might be argued that the metaphor of the Watson legend represents our tragic history of unbridled enterprise and racism and the ongoing erosion of our human habitat...the ills of our great republic as perceived through the eyes of backcountry Americans..."
           Matthiessen's telling of the Watson legend has been variously compared to Joseph Conrad (Ron Hansen, NY Times), Faulkner (Tom LeClair, NY Times) and the dark side of Twain (Ron Carlson, LA Times). Though its messages resonate, Shadow Country is more than anything a character study, steeped in the never-ending storyteller's question: why do people do what they do? Not proselytizing nor speechifying, not polemical, Matthiessen lets the characters and their lives reveal their place and time, and how Florida became what it is.

A SCUBA instructor, boat captain and pilot, John Bond has written six non-fiction books about poker. His short story "T-Bird" appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2007. His website is johnbondwriting.com

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