Synopses & Reviews
Review
"In this collection Humphrey proves himself a master at evoking place, mood, and characters caught in volatile situations. It is with equal conviction that he thrusts us into the lives of artists—compromised, disillusioned, failed—and into the lives of dirt farmers in Depression-era Texas, men and women forever waiting for the gusher which, if and when it does come, shatters dreams only more quickly and completely than does the gnawing poverty. Desperation, Humphrey's great theme, seems to choke the air as tangibly as does the dust in his 'Texas' pieces where characters, coming to see their static lives as valueless, risk death easily and foolishly in the vain hope of 'escaping.' Perhaps the desperation of Humphrey's characters—of artists struggling to make peace with the ideals that capture their minds, of poor farmers fighting to come to terms with the land that traps their bodies—perhaps this feverishness culminates in the collection's final story, 'The Last of the Caddoes,' in which an obscure, vanished tribe of Indians 'possesses' an adolescent boy. In the boy's search to discover his heritage, involving an excavation of the ancient burial mound on his grandfather's farm, he alienates his mother and rejects his name—all for the sake of the ghosts inside his head." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)