Robert Flynn’s second novel tracks a day in the life of Pat Shahan, minister of a Protestant church in a large city. Young, devout, and honest, Shahan seeks revelationand is offered a revolving neon cross for the church steeple; he seeks visionand gets a pep talk from the church treasurer. Striving to serve the Lord, he is dragged into a Great Crusade” which is nothing more than a publicity stunt that ends disastrously. Shahan’s day sees him ministering to the sick and dying, pacifying angry parishioners and counseling troubled ones, seeking inspiration for a sermon, trying to calm his mother by phone, and losing patience with his family. Pat Shahan is a thoroughly human minister.Throughout his dayand by extension his ministryhe struggles to balance his faith in Christianity with his doubts about himself and his church. His story gives a pulpit-eye view of organized religion, a view that is occasionally humorous, sometimes affectionate, always open-minded, and ultimately affirmative. There is darkness in the world,” says Shahan, but there is also light."

In the house of the Lord

Flynn, Robert

Hutchinson

And Holy Is His Name

Religion & Spirituality

Dimension Books

North to Yesterday (Texas Tradition Series) (Volume 4)

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

TCU Press

The Sounds of Rescue, the Signs of Hope (Texas Tradition Series) (Volume 12)

United States

Wanderer Springs is a dying town in Northwest Texas, one of that string of dusty towns left to wither away when the highway from Fort Worth to Amarillo bypassed them. For travelers on that highway, the harsh and unforgiving countryside passes as no more than a blur. For Will Callaghan, that country and the town of Wanderer Springs are carved into memory, indelible in their clarity. Called home from San Antonio by a funeral, Will begins a journey, both physical and imaginative, that crosses not only geographic and cultural boundaries but darts back and forth in time, mixing stories of the town's frontier past with episodes of Will's high school days. In sometimes hilarious and sometimes painful detail, Will relives the football game where he dropped the pass that lost the championship for Wanderer Springs forever, the time he got his gum stuck in his girlfriend's hair, the strangely distant but close relationship of a motherless boy and his taciturn father. Equally clear are the tales from the past--the Turrill family's desperate wagon ride to find a doctor for their daughter, dying of appendicitus, or Lulu Byars who danced and danced in town and caught pneumonia riding back to her dugout in a norther. Wanderer Springs said she died of frivolity. Through it all, the clear voice of Will Callaghan, a good old boy grown into an intellectual, gives meaning to the chaos, seeks sense out of the past, recognizes our inextricable link to the past. Wanderer Springs is a wonderfully witty, sensitive novel that will stand out as one of the more serious, thoughtful, and memorable novels to come out of recent Texas writing.

Wanderer Springs: A Novel

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

Robert Flynn’s second novel tracks a day in the life of Pat Shahan, minister of a Protestant church in a large city. Young, devout, and honest, Shahan seeks revelation—and is offered a revolving neon cross for the church steeple; he seeks vision—and gets a pep talk from the church treasurer. Striving to serve the Lord, he is dragged into a “Great Crusade” which is nothing more than a publicity stunt that ends disastrously. Shahan’s day sees him ministering to the sick and dying, pacifying angry parishioners and counseling troubled ones, seeking inspiration for a sermon, trying to calm his mother by phone, and losing patience with his family. Pat Shahan is a thoroughly human minister. Throughout his day—and by extension his ministry—he struggles to balance his faith in Christianity with his doubts about himself and his church. His story gives a pulpit-eye view of organized religion, a view that is occasionally humorous, sometimes affectionate, always open-minded, and ultimately affirmative. “There is darkness in the world,” says Shahan, “but there is also light."

In the House of the Lord (Texas Tradition Series) (Volume 16)

Hyenas are scavengers and predators. They prey on the weak and the helpless and even their fellow predators, the lions. Like lions, the people in Robert Flynn’s stories learn to make accommodations to the hyenas and to a society that tolerates them. Sometimes accommodation is painful, as in “A Boy and His Dog,” the story of a Marine and his dog trained to sniff out mines and booby-traps in the Vietnam War. Sometimes the process of accommodation is comic, bringing out Flynn’s characteristic wit, as in “At Play in the Sewers of the Lord,” which juxtaposes theology and sewage treatment. But most often Flynn's stories make us look at ourselves as they probe difficult subjects—the innate cruelty of children, our intolerance and lack of compassion for the elderly. In the title story, the main character decides that if she could live with her husband for forty years, she surely could live with hyenas. Flynn’s characters teach us all to be heroes of accommodation.

Living with the Hyenas

What if post-Soviet Union Russia sent biological warfare missiles to the United States, only this time the missiles were animals infected with a virulent form of rickettsia? That's the premise behind this suspense-filled novel from one of Texas’ best-known authors. Hunter Jacob Trace is peacefully trapping mountain lions miles away in the Big Bend when violent turbulence rocks a DC-10 on a cross-Atlantic flight. Just as Trace is unaware of the strange turns his life is about to take, the crew is unaware that three rare Siberian tigers in the hold, being sent to U.S. zoos in Houston, San Diego, and Seattle as part of a breeding program, have been jolted out of their cages. When one tiger makes its way to the cabin, the excitement and terror begin. The plane, unable to land in Houston because of bad weather, crashes in Corpus Christi Bay, its pilots killed by the tiger, its passengers terrified. Although many passengers survive the crash, including Arina Yeroskin, the Russian woman veterinarian accompanying the animals, the tigers are presumed dead. But are they? First a tiger is sighted near Padre Island, then a man is killed on a river bottom near Aransas Pass. When a prize bull is slaughtered in Jim Wells County to the southeast, it’s apparent the tiger is traveling far and fast—or is it a second tiger? Other incidents—a woman attacked in her home, a tiger invading a cantina—lead to widespread hysteria and a real concern about how many tigers are loose in South Texas and how many died in the plane crash. The North American Zoological Association hires Trace to stalk the tigers and capture them alive, but he’s not the only one on the feline trail. Right-wing militia, convinced the tigers are part of a UN plot and spurred on by an anonymous benefactor, want to find and kill the tigers. Evelyn Price and Rand Morgan, representing NAZA, have their own agendas. Rand wants to capture the tigers to advance his career; Evelyn, passionate about animal rights, plots to free the cats. Eventually officials of the Mexican government are also in on the chase, hoping to kill the tigers and return their ashes to Russia for a reward. Only Arina Yeroskin and the reader know why the post-communist Russian government wants their prize animals dead, not alive. Even when survivors of tiger attacks die of “complications,” one after the other, only Arina suspects that the tigers were infected to serve as biological weapons by right-wing scientists hoping to restore communism in Russia. The suspense of the tiger hunt is surpassed only by the spine-tingling terror of a tiger stalking its victim be it human or the tracking dogs that fall prey.

The Devils Tiger

Klepper, Dan

The tangled relationships of Robert Flynn’s award- winning novel Wanderer Springs surface again in Tie- Fast Country, this time centered around an elderly ranch woman, whose father raised her to be a cowboy, and her grandson, who doesn’t know her and has been raised to hate her. When Chance Carter, general manager of a TV station in Florida, gets a telephone call that his grandmother’s health is failing and that he must do something about her, he knows only that he is heir to a million-dollar ranch and that his grandmother may have killed his grandfather and the man who was perhaps his father. His idea of a Texas ranch comes from television and he does not know what he will have to do to slide Rista Wyler off her land and into a nursing home. Nor does he know that the only cowboy Rista has left is Pug Caldwell, an old man who has worked for her since he was a teenager and may want the ranch for himself. Reluctantly Chance leaves Florida behind, where he is in control of his own world, and also leaves Shana, the woman he loves but to whom he cannot quite commit. He finds himself more than a world away on the Texas ranch where Rista and Pug have thrown up barricades against intruders. He has no television, no phone, no contact with the outside world. And the food is monotonous and not very good. As Chance watches for certifiable signs of senility in Rista and plans what he'll say to a judge, she puts him to work mending fences and doctoring cows with Pug. In chapters that alternate between the past and the present, Rista reveals the truth of the tangled story of her life. Gradually she introduces Chance to people and events that his mother had dis- torted in the telling. He finds out why Rista still searches the ranch for the undiscovered grave of her aunt, killed by Indians; he comes to know his grandfather, Odis, and even his great-grandfather, Claris, men of different temperaments and different loyalties. And he learns about Stoddard, the newspaperman Rista loved but could not marry. He even learns some bitter truths about his mother, Cassie, and her hatred for the ranch. Chance comes to understand that Rista's commitment to the land is the strongest force in her life, a commitment taught her by her father. Over the years her tenacity in hanging on to the land cost her husband, lover, daughter, and grandson, but she never considered changing. As Chance is learning to understand, if not accept completely, the world of his grandmother, Shana provides the sharp contrast of modern life. When Chance escapes to a telephone in town and calls Shana, she reports on the TV station, where sensationalism, not truth, matters. With a strong and sure narrative voice, Flynn tells a dramatic story about people, the inability of some to change, the ability of others to adapt, and the lessons some learned. The novel is set against a ranching back- ground that is accurate down to the last detail and word.

Tie-Fast Country

Romance

Robert Flynn's new novel, Echoes of Glory centers on a fictitious Texas county that embraces its legends, but not its actual history. Set in the Reagan era, the novel exposes shared myths as lies and the truth, lacking all comfort. In his inimitable style Flynn paints a portrait of the denizens of the county who tacitly embrace the legend as all too human and all too frail. Overshadowed by the accomplishments of adjacent Doss County, Mills County clings to its legends—the legendary Mills brothers. One brother had died at the Alamo, one at Goliad, three had fought at San Jacinto. The three survivors marched into the center of Texas bringing with them stories of heroism and acorns from the San Jacinto battlefield. According to tradition, they planted an oak tree for each hero who had died at the Alamo. Then there was Timpson Smith, sole survivor of Second Platoon of Marine reserves, who had prevented the North Korean army from driving U.S. and U.N. forces into the sea. To honor their memory the county erected a monument, "Second to None," topped with the heroic figure of Timpson Smith. But there is a less heroic side of Mills County. When Deputy Sheriff Larry Maddin decides to run against Sheriff and Local Hero Timpson Smith, and a drama professor at the university announces that he will write a play depicting the true story of Second Platoon, many fear the dark underside of Mills County will be exposed.

Echoes of Glory

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