Set on a plantation in northern Peru, against the backdrop of El Niño and the resulting storms and floods, Meeting the Dead tells the story of two young Americans who get caught up in a blood feud between two powerful Peruvian families.The plot revolves around John Hauser, a Texan who accompanies his friend David Leroy on a journey of discovery to South America. John must decide whether to sell the ranch his father has left him or to keep a deathbed promise to his father and return home to work the land.While in Peru, John forges a relationship with local landowner Heim Ulmson and gets involved in Heim's struggle to keep his plantation from being stolen by a prominent banker, Don Enrique de la Cruz. As John finds himself drawn into the fight between the Ulmson and de la Cruz families, he becomes romantically involved with Heim's beautiful neighbor, Linda de la Piedra.David also pursues Linda, causing a rift between the two best friends. As the storms worsen and the floodwaters rise, John discovers supernatural elements to the blood feud between Heim and Don Enrique, and finds himself being forced to commit murder by a means he never imagined possible.

Meeting the Dead: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Geyer, Andrew

United States

University of New Mexico Press

Diverse in setting and broad in range, these award-winning stories all turn, in some way, on the passing of the rural Southwest Texas way of life and its stamp on those who leave there.Ranging from bare-bones narratives to magical realism and ever lush in regional particulars, the stories all center on a sense of place. Sharing a point of origin and a journey, their characters weave in and out of the stories, looking for new starts-for answers-and seeing the world through dry eyes. They explore exotic Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, and a dig site in Peru and make a voyage of discovery down the Amazon River. They lose faith in God and find it again in such unlikely places as a water lot in South Carolina.The displaced protagonists all search for something elusive, something lost, yet in Geyer's hands are yoked by a tension that is somehow always new and always compelling.Andrew Geyer's earthy, edgy, colorful stories range from Texas to Peru, reflecting life's frustrations and occasional small triumphs.—Elmer KeltonThe contents...reads like the track listing of some Marty Robbins album-dusty and elegiac, but with that ten-dollar smile, that flash of white teeth under a hat brim. Even when the stories take you to South Carolina, or South America, still, it's Texas. The real one.—Stephen Graham JonesThe most important work of fiction to come out of the Southwest since Woman Hollering Creek.—Michael Hathaway

Whispers in Dust and Bone: Andrew Geyer

Texas Tech University Press

Siren Songs from the Heart of Austin does new and vibrant things with narrative. Magical realism adds its rainbow colors to the twenty-two first person pieces that interweave to tell the story of a group of people living in Austin, Texas. The six main narrative threads overlap and entwine around the idea of love in its myriad forms. Aqua Vitae Café, in turn of the millennium Austin, is the central connection-although the settings range from Austin to New Mexico to Guatemala and Honduras. And through it all, the Prophet Mudcat sings his siren songs, trying to usher in the Age of Aquarius by returning humankind to the water . . . .

Siren Songs from the Heart of Austin

Literary

Ink Brush Press

Dixie Fish does vibrant things with narrative and voice. The novel chronicles the life of Walt Whitman Woodcock, a Southwest Texas ranch boy who comes to Columbia, SC with a seven-point plan for achieving true bliss. Armed with a phonographic memory--everything he hears, he remembers--a job waiting tables at the Dixie Fish, and a fraudulent admission to graduate school, W.W.W. sets about the task of creating nirvana in the capital of South Carolina . . .

Dixie Fish

Co-authors Terry Dalrymple, Jerry Craven and Andrew Geyer deliver the excitement promised in the title and then some as they propel the reader through pages of love, lust, betrayal and redemption. The sixteen interlocked narratives move at a clip through time and space, from the Civil War to the present, from sun-scorched brush country to the lush and sometimes lethal Piney Woods. Although readers may detect shades of Hawthorne and Faulkner in the haunted houses, serial characters, disembodied voices and rattling family skeletons appearing in these stories, their ethos is distinctly Texan, complete with fields of swaying bluebonnets, sprawling ranches, a champion roping horse and plenty of three-alarm chile. The authors deftly sidestep stereotypes, however, instead showcasing such unexpected characters as a cowboy who hates cattle, a parrot that curses mailmen, and a Hill Country farmer who prays to the Roman goddess Fortuna. Reading this story cycle is like doing a jigsaw puzzle--there's no mistaking the satisfaction of snapping that final piece into place and admiring the master narrative that suddenly emerges.

Dancing on Barbed Wire

Craven, Jerry

Dalrymple, Terry

Angelina River Press

Magic, Mystery, Madness

Genre Fiction

The voices of these characters are raw and real, and they cry out to be heard. The interwoven stories in Lesser Mountains delve into the lives of the fictional people living in and around the small town of Jordan, Texas, in much the same way Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kittredge does for those living in Crosby, Maine. Texas settings, common themes, shared imagery, and intertwined plots combine to reveal the life arcs of everyday folks who find themselves displaced by the passing of the rural Southwest Texas way of life. The protagonists for the major plotlines are introduced in the opening story, and the subsequent narratives link the trajectories of their lives in unexpected and fascinating ways--a novelistic effect that makes the whole much more than just the sum of its parts.

Lesser Mountains

Lamar University Press

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Books by Geyer, Andrew