Sandhill Chronicle
4 total works
Fleeing Atlanta and an emotionally abusive marriage, Imogene McBride is heading west with her precocious, beautiful teenage daughter, Cora, when their car breaks down in the tiny North Texas town of Agatite. While her mother sits out its repair on a bench on the courthouse lawn, Cora wanders off to buy ice cream, enters a drugstore and disappears without a trace. Initially, believing Cora is playing a prank, an agitated Imma storms the drugstore and then the sheriffs office demanding answers. When answers don't come, she returns to the park bench to wait, her annoyance turning to fear, and then obsession. So begins Immas vigil and the classic first novel of Reynolds' ""Sandhill Chronicles"", a timeless testament to place and character. As her waiting stretches from days and weeks into years, Imma becomes as the town eccentric if not mad woman a pivotal institution in Agatite and the lives of its inhabitants. Most affected by Immas obsession is Sheriff Ezra Holmes, a widower who has kept his emotional life in check since the death of his beloved wife. Now his controlled life is disrupted by the woman on the bench, whose presence compels and arouses Ezra in ways mysterious even to himself. As he works to unravel the mystery of Coras disappearance, a bond develops between the aging sheriff and the eccentric woman who brings Ezra both new hope and forces him to confront his own pain. An absorbing blend of mystery, psychological thriller, and character study, this tale of one womans obsession and the spell it casts is utterly unforgettable. '[An] engrossing first novel. [Reynolds] knows how to create and sustain tension without resorting to sensationalism. His book, like its protagonist, has a stubborn integrity that you cant help admiring. [Immas] metamorphosis...is absorbing' - ""New York Times"".
'This is Reynoldss fourth novel about the dusty, hot, and sleepy West Texas town of Agatite, a faded stewpot of roiling passions, savage gossip, and crooked politics...This warm and entertaining story is solidly written and vividly atmospheric. Reynolds spins a compelling yarn' - ""Publishers Weekly"". 'Although [Reynolds] is not as well known outside of Texas as Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy, he has probed and deciphered the nature of the past at levels deeper than theirs ...and in his new novel, ""Monuments"", the results of his quest are brought into apposite and poignant focus' - ""Bloomsbury Review"". 'Fourteen-year-old Hugh Rudd had his summer planned: mow lawns, practice baseball, buy a new mountain bike, get ready for high school. But the Burlington Northern Railroads determination to demolish the Hendershot Grocery Ware-house, a symbol of Hughs small Texas home town since the turn of the century...makes Hugh re-examine his plans...The final confrontation is both action-packed and satisfying' - ""Booklist"". 'Hugh Rudd learns during one summer in his small north Texas town that nothing lasts forever especially innocence. ""San Antonio Express-News"" secures [Reynoldss] place among fine Texas and American writers...A wonderfully satisfying reading experience' - Review of ""Texas Books"". There is no doubt of the authors keen understanding of what makes a small town tick. Denver Post Novelist, critic, and native Texan Clay Reynolds is professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas and serves as the schools associate dean for undergraduate studies. His numerous other works include ""Threading the Needle"" and ""The Vigil"", both published by Texas Tech University Press.
In a chilling mixture of the nostalgic and the supernatural, Clay Reynolds adds to his ""Sandhill Chronicles"" this story of Faustian bargains, drag racing, old-time rock and roll, and a sister's love for a brother who dies tragically young. Sherry Littlefield, heroine of this tale of high speed and certain death, finds out a horrible truth about the senseless accident that took the life of her older brother, Keith. By piecing together clues, she learns that her brother discovered a ghostly drag race that takes place every spring on the Old Loop, an antique stretch of highway that leads to an impassable tunnel called the Needle. Long before Sherry and Keith were born, a local tough and street hood, Bobby Dean, made himself legendary for his prowess behind the wheel of Black Sabbath, his powerful and souped-up '57 Chevy. Taking on and defeating all comers, he evolved a deadly race that terminated at the Needle, a contest wherein only the winner was left alive. Eventually, Bobby Dean's evil caught up with him. His and Black Sabbath's fatal crash ended an era. Or so everyone thought. Now returned as a spirit, Bobby Dean emerges on warm spring nights to take on new challengers. On the line are the souls of the living and the dead - the stakes of beating a demon at his own game. Keith's soul has joined the defeated, but Sherry, finding and rebuilding her brother's demolished '66 Mustang, determines to finish what he started. Hell-bent to meet the demonic Bobby Dean in one last challenge, Sherry vows to thread the Needle and free Keith's soul. A steadily building suspense follows Sherry's systematic search for weakness in her ghostly adversary and her obsessive honing of her skills under the hood and behind the wheel. Despite her obsession, when the showdown is imminent, only a wellspring of faith can enable Sherry to pit herself against the dark legacy that haunts her small town.
Sandhill County - Clay Reynolds' Yoknapatawpha - is the setting for all nine stories in this collection. Reynolds sees his stories as reflective fragments, the kind one notices when driving through a county in North Central Texas - old buildings and houses, each one concealing a story. I wonder about such places, who may have built them and what they looked like new. I think also about newer places, or places that have been converted from one thing to another, and I wonder about the people behind the windows and doors, what their stories truly are. Sometimes a sensation that wouldn't cause so much as a ripple in the city may roll like a tidal wave in a small town. But at the same time, individuals come and go, are born, grow up, live out their lives and die, sometimes with no one truly knowing who they are and where they came from - no one ever privy to their hopes, dreams, triumphs, and disappointments. Too often they blend too easily into the backgrounds. I hope that these stories illuminate them, make them more visible, and bring their lives to the fore by showing that within each is a personalized existence, one that may be funny or sad, poignant or nonsensical, but which always fits, somehow, into the greater chronicle of a single place. It takes all of them to make the place whole. And just so, these gathered short stories make whole and illuminate the place that informs Reynolds' Sandhill novels, from ""The Vigil"" and ""Agatite"" to his most recent, ""Threading the Needle"".