SKIP HORACK
author of THE SOUTHERN CROSS & THE EDEN HUNTER
REVIEWS
THE SOUTHERN CROSS:
Amid the rich panoply of bayous and barrier islands, the magic and menace of the Gulf Coast is revealed
during a year in which the disillusioned and righteous, deranged and expectant, downtrodden and clever
consider the uncertainty of life, before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. Nature, human and Mother,
informs every aspect of existence in Horack's potent world, a microcosm of all that is paradoxically
tentative yet steadfast. In such an inherently hostile but innately delicate environment, men and their
hounds may run wild, but not necessarily free. A devious migrant worker uses sex as a means of escape; a
feisty widow rues time's passage from the lawn of her nursing home; a notorious ex-con toys with the idea
of tenderness. Cast in unfavorable circumstances, characters react in ways that surprise both themselves
and the reader. Season by season, Horack's debut collection finds much to love, more to respect as he
divulges the secrets, traditions, and memories that defy and define this iconic land and its people.
— Booklist
Horack’s writing is beautifully rendered, his descriptions of people and places near-poetry, and he is pitch-perfect his descriptions of Louisiana.
—The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA) (Click for full review)
This engrossing collection of short stories, some barely a page in length, is set in the hardscrabble South, along the Gulf Coast just before and after the apocalyptic hurricane season of 2005. But Skip Horack has no moral to preach, no ax to grind. Beyond their artfully evoked and deeply felt sense of place, if these stories are about anything, they are about the characters who inhabit them, easily and profoundly.
—Boston Globe (Click for full review)
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. 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. Sit up and listen.
— The Rumpus, 8/10/09 (Click for full review)
The characters, each uniquely interesting, are deeply tied to the harsh Gulf Coast landscape, hurricanes notwithstanding, of swamps and uncertain waters and heat
— The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) (Click for full review)
This is a beautiful — and sometimes disturbing — collection of stories. It has its own voice; it doesn’t conform to any kind of structural requirements you might imagine for the short-story-collection format.
— The Weather Outside (Click for full review)
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.
— A Writer's Reading Room (Click for full review)
After reading this collection it is difficult not to compare Horack's stories to another of the South's most powerful writers, Larry Brown. In time, these stories may be the introduction to the work of Horack in the same way Facing the Music became an introduction to the work of Brown.
— Rhythm and Books (Click for full review)
The sixteen stories that form Skip Horack’s Bakeless prize-winning debut collection, The Southern Cross, are tough and lean and proud as the Southern Gulf Coast characters who fill their pages. With restraint, empathy, and an intimate understanding of dramatic tragedy, each piece steadily and surely cuts to the blood-bright bone.
— The Collagist (Click for full review)
In this region, the ties to the land are not always as sure as they are for ranchers or farmers. There is no medicine for a flash flood or a hurricane. There are no pesticides for all those water moccasins because they aren’t pests; humans have encroached on their swamplands and waterways. Horack knows this coexistence—the inextricable link between the rural people of the Gulf Coast and their land—and represents it wonderfully.
This is a world we enter into fully, led as we are by atmospheric prose, compelling characters, an unsparing vision of the world as it is. We emerge from reading these stories, amazed by the places we've been and the things we've seen; surprised by the imagined blood on our hands, the butterflies on our shoulders, the fish swimming in unexpected waters. Welcome, Skip Horack, Louisiana storyteller of uncommon talent.
—The Times-Picayune (New Orleans) (Click for full review)
This collection vividly depicts life on the pre- and post-Katrina Gulf Coast. In "The Journeyman," Clayton, reluctantly preparing to head out for a three-month stint of work in South America, meets a young girl, Kenyatta, who warns him that God and Jesus are going to punish the people of New Orleans and destroy the city. Amused by her earnest warning, Clayton chuckles and thanks her for the heads up. In "The Redfish," Luther, recently released from prison after a wrongful murder conviction (he has committed murder, just not the one he was convicted of), gets tangled up with a no-good woman and ends up bound and gagged with his now-ex-girlfriend's mother in her trailer as Katrina approaches. In "Junebelle," June, a reclusive widow unhappily stuck in a Baton Rouge retirement home after her well-meaning daughter installed her there, avoids interaction with the other residents and spends much time in fond remembrances. Throughout, water is a force, at times standing in for death, at others for peace and beauty. Horack takes in a wide swath of varied characters and finds the common humanity in their struggles.
Anyone who crafts characters as vital, funny, and heartbreakingly human as Skip Horack does in The Southern Cross deserves a "Hot Damn!" slap and a "Roll Tide!" whoop. (It will be noted by this Alabaman reviewer that Horack is Louisianan, but several of the stories in this collection take place in Alabama.) His voice morphs seamlessly as he inhabits the lives of: a grad student aimlessly chasing sturgeon and love, a stripper toying with a not-so-saintly evangelical preacher, an ex-con thrust into the heart of a hurricane, a lonely rabbit breeder forced to kill his plague-infested animals, and a disillusioned poet in search of lost ancestors (to name a few), all scattered about the Gulf Coast in 2005—before, during, and after Katrina. Horack's prose illuminates the shadows around us: One character, tentatively descending into a mud cave deep in a Baton Rouge swamp, realizes that "though it is dark at first, a few steps more and he can't believe what he is seeing, what he has been missing this whole time, these worlds within worlds."
—Oxord American (July 2009 Editors' Pick)
This spare, detached treatment distinguishes Horack's work from much Katrina literature, most notably Tom Piazza's 2008 novel "City of Refuge," a fecund epic-and a specifically New Orleans book - set in the heart of it all. But it's also of a piece with the sensibility of his characters, their conflicts ... even his lean prose itself. And it makes "The Southern Cross" particularly effective as a short-story collection, which can work both intimately and ephemerally. The lives here are strangely dual: at once totally fragile and disinclined to change. They may be swept away by a storm; as easily, a storm may barely register. Horack has wisely realized that there is a story, and maybe even a better one, in what isn't changed by catastrophe.
—San Francisco Chronicle (Click for full review)
In their errors and screw-ups each of Horack’s characters reveals a shade of humanity that is alternately confounding and surprising. Why do we act the way we do? Maybe we’re all just who we are, and there’s no changing that.
— Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Click for full review)
A great collection of chapters that tell assorted stories occurring right before, during and after Katrina.
— Dew on the Kudzu (Click for full review)
With memorable characters and interesting plots, The Southern Cross should make a favorable impression on its readers. But plot or character is not the star here, language is. Precise, informative, evocative, surprising, the language of these stories shines with hard brilliance. We hear how a rabbit farmer talks. “I was her husband,” he says, explaining himself to a young cop, the past tense exposing his sad loss of self. In “Borderlands” we read of one girl that “a pool of girls absorbed her like a bead of mercury.” The protagonist of the closing story “fished the back, dead-end waters above North Pass, stretching small nets along the trespasses and washout gaps where bayous bled into the swamp.” Horack is a new, vigorous voice, not loud but splendidly clear.
