Michael Gills – författare

The House across from the Deaf School, Michael Gills’ third collection of short fi ction, continues the life and times of Joey Harvell, whose stepfather, in “Last Words on Lonoke,” gives him a .30-06, tells him not to aim at anything he doesn’t want to kill, and “that’s pretty much it for [his] gun safety lessons.” Later, in “What The Newly Dead Don’t Know But Learn,” his uncle swims Joey and a group of fake cowboys across a creek on Camp Robinson, only a fisherman’s trotline is stretched across the S-curve, and the result, like the book as a whole, is a hard fight there’s no recovering from.

True to its name, Burning Down My Father’s House, comes at you like a house on fire. Michael Gills’s fourth collection of short fiction continues the saga of Joey Harvell, who’s from a people prone to impromptu fistfights on the sides of southern highways, where they drive semis hauling dead whales floating in beds of formaldehyde, after all, “this was the Dixie Circuit–it was nothing for a Peterbilt to pull off the interstate with a six-hundred-pound rat, two-headed goats or Donkey Woman nursing horsey-faced twins.” Murderous and grace-infused, these stories incinerate the family trials and tribulations that collect and go on collecting until they stack floor to ceiling under the carports of our lives. What’s left after the great conflagration is a matter of the heart, how we love, even when it’s impossible.

The Death of Bonnie and Clyde and Other Stories follows the trail of its wayward characters down the Delta back roads, crossing paths with Hernando DeSoto--hands bloodied by the indian slaughters--hitchhikers and thieves, UFO’s, concrete finishers, naked fishermen, a lusty cheer squad caught and confessing in the midst of a killer tornado, and trash telescope salesmen on the day after Christmas–all saintly guardians of the human heart. From the Florida Coast up through the Carolinas and over to Arkansas’ Ozarks, Bonnie and Clyde blazes a trail of love and deceit, hard liquor and the revelation of what it’s like to be free and wild and in love on this earth.