It is said that we kill each other in my family, and it may be true. Certainly we inflict wounds on each other that cannot be borne, and cause irreparable losses...It may be because we are from Texas. The long alkali flats, and the oil boiling beneath them, make people mad. That is what happened to my family.In any case, no death occurs without suspicion and the laying of blame... Most of the whispers lead to my grandfather Hiram. He broke many of the hearts and caused a few of the deaths, and may have died of a broken heart himselfHe was a sonofabitch, a wild man with a white widow's peak and eyes the dry blue of the Texas sky... He once sucked honey from the hummingbird throat of an Indian princess. That's what he told me.So begins Wildcatting, Shann Nix's astonishing and much-talked-about debut, a novel that captures the American West as perhaps none has before, combining gritty realism with extraordinary myth and magic.Wildcatting is the story of a family with a memory. A family with a long shadow. A family with an unbelievable power of forgetting.Wildcatting is about the death of innocence, and the revenge of an oil well. it's about an abandoned heritage, the eerie, feverish, delicate tales of the American West that have been obscured by the blank stereotype of the cowboy and the saloon.But mostly it's about Hiram, a patriarch who charmed his family to their destruction, and the women who let him do it: Lee, his frigid, boyish mother who honored only God and horses, in equal measure; Nakomas Sorrel, his first true love and first true victim; Francine, the preacher's wife, who should have been his from the beginning; his sister Demeter, who dreamed of him in the fire; Anise, his bitter first wife who died of his infidelity; and his three daughters, Constance, Amelia, and Sarsaparilla, who grew in his shadow and never fell out of love with him, even after they had broken his heart.Wildcatting is storytelling at its very best-bold, beautiful, wholly original, and deeply moving and it immediately establishes Shann Nix as one of our most gifted young novelists.I was the last of the many women he loved. Women surrounded him with their bodies, reflecting him like a pool. They showed back to him the man he wanted to be. They paid for that, in the end.I was fifteen years old when he died. I never told him goodbye. When he died he left me a desk that had belonged to his mother. It was dark and polished, with long curves. I left it behind me for ten years. After that I went back to see if I had killed him.
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Book details

• Format Hardcover
• Pages402 pages
• LanguageEnglish
• ISBN100385424116
• ISBN139780385424110