Growing Up Dead in Texas

"Jones combines memoir and mystery in his latest novel (after Zombie Bake-Off), returning to his hometown of Greenwood, Texas, to explore a decades-old crime that would rend a community irrevocably asunder. In 1985, when the author is just 12 years old, a suspicious fire decimates Greenwood's cotton crop and threatens many of the townsfolk's livelihoods. Local teen Tommy Moore is caught in the field with an incriminatingly lit cigarette, and his savage beating by a descendant of the community's largest landowning family kicks off a tragic cycle of retribution that exacerbates longstanding conflicts amongst the people of Greenwood. Drawing from memory, interviews, and town legend, Jones acknowledges that he's an unreliable narrator, and that his story is 'piecemeal, secondhand, polluted, cleaned-up then tore down.' The book is an ambitious hybrid of fact and myth, past and present, that calls into question the nature of truth itself. While its sprawling web of characters and story lines may seem convoluted at times, the novel is unified by Jones's rhythmic prose and his evident compassion for his former neighbors' tragedies — both personal and pastoral. (June)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

It was a fire that could be seen for miles, a fire that split the community, a fire that turned families on each other, a fire that it's still hard to get a straight answer about. A quarter of a century ago, someone held a match to Greenwood, Texas's cotton.

Stephen Graham Jones was twelve that year. What he remembers best, what's stuck with him all this time, is that nobody ever came forward to claim that destruction.

And nobody was ever caught.

Greenwood just leaned forward into next years work, and the year after that, pretending that the fire had never happened. But it had.

This fire, it didn't start twenty-five years ago. It had been smoldering for years by then. And everybody knew it. Getting them to say anything about it's another thing, though. Some secrets were buried on purpose.

Now Stephen's going back the only way he knows how: with a pen. His first time back since he graduated high school. There's questions to be asked, there's stories to be recorded, and pieces of other stories that can be put together.

Packed with small-town paranoia, mystery, and more secrets than your average graveyard, Growing Up Dead in Texas is Stephen Graham Jones' breakout novel. It's a story about farming. It's a story about Texas. It's a story about finally standing up from the dead, and walking away. And then going back one more time, when it's supposed to have been long enough ago already that you can deal with it as just events, as just facts.

In the tradition of Robert McCammon's A Boy's Life and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, Growing up Dead in Texas is a narrative lens onto the past, to see where things started. And where they keep starting again and again.

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of eight novels and two collections. Stephen's been a Shirley Jackson Award finalist three times, a Bram Stoker Award finalist, a Black Quill Award finalist, an International Horror Guild finalist, a Colorado Book Award Finalist, a Texas Monthly Book Selection, and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction and the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction. He's also been a Texas Writers League Fellow and an NEA fellow in fiction. His short fiction has been in Cemetery Dance, Asimov's, Weird Tales, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, etc., as well as all the journals: Open City, Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Literal Latte, Cutbank, and on and on, some hundred and thirty stories, total, through every letter of the alphabet. A lot of those stories have been included in multiple best-of-the-year compilations, textbooks, and anthologies, too.

Though Blackfeet, Stephen was born in 1972 in West Texas. This is often confusing, as most Blackfeet are in Montana and he grew up working from tractors and horses and in all kinds of welding and automotive shops. There was also lots of hunting and basketball and various scrapes with the law. After getting his PhD from Florida State University in a record two years, Stephen, twenty-eight then, went to work in the warehouse at Sear's (all he ever planned), but injuries forced him into teaching. And it's not a bad life, being a professor. Stephen made full professor at 36 — likely the youngest full prof in the humanities at The University of Colorado at Boulder (and maybe all of Colorado) and is into fiction, comics, film, screenwriting, and anything horror or fantasy, western or science fiction. Or, just anything that tells an interesting story in an interesting way.