Coronado: Stories (P.S.)

“There’s not a wasted word in these dark, spare tales about disenfranchised males of the South” From School Library Journal Adult/High School–In this collection of five short stories and a brief play, Lehane assembles a disparate cast, yet each individual takes part in a similar search for something elusive. In ICU, Daniel is hunted down by assailants and must hide in a hospital waiting room to survive. Until Gwen reunites a young man just released from prison with the father who corrupted him. Several of the pieces are set in the South, and their pacing is infused with the slowness of a Southern drawl. The mastery of the author's storytelling lies in his ability to create atmosphere. His characters are defined by the mood of the world around them, a world that is often confining and in which hope is thrown aside in favor of a grim pragmatism. Lehane populates his stories with people who are ordinary and reveals the extraordinary complexity of their lives. The decisions they face are unenviable and their choices somehow unavoidable. The author invents nuanced relationships in which murder and betrayal become acts of loyalty and friendship. Each story introduces a touch of the unlikely or unfortunate into otherwise mundane circumstances, then relays the consequences as events unfold. Haunting imagery lingers long after the book is closed. –Heidi Dolamore, San Mateo County Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Dennis Lehane, the award-winning author of Mystic River, Shutter Island, and the Kenzie-Gennaro series, comes a striking collection offive short stories and a play. A small southern town gives birth to a dangerous man with a broken heart and a high-powered rifle. . . . A young girl, caught up in an inner-city gang war, crosses the line from victim to avenger. . . . An innocent man is hunted by government agents for an unspecified crime. . . . A boy and a girl fall in love while ransacking a rich man's house during the waning days of the Vietnam War. . . . A compromised psychiatrist confronts the unstable patient he slept with. . . . A father and a son wage a lethal battle of wits over the whereabouts of a stolen diamond and a missing woman. . . .Along with completely original material, this new col-lection is a compilation of the best of Dennis Lehane's previously published short stories, including "Until Gwen," which was adapted for the stage in 2005 and appears in this book as the play Coronado . At turns suspenseful, surreal, romantic, and tragically comic, these tales journey headlong into the heart of our national myths—about class, gender, freedom, and regeneration through violence—and reveal that the truth waiting for us there is not what we'd expect. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Coronado Stories By Dennis Lehane HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. Copyright ©2006 Dennis LehaneAll right reserved. ISBN: 006113967X Chapter One This thing with Blue and the dogs and Elgin Bern happened a while back, a few years after some of our boys—like Elgin Bern and Cal Sears—came back from Vietnam, and a lot of others—like Eddie Vorey and Carl Joe Carol, the Stewart cousins—didn't. We don't know how it worked in other towns, but that war put something secret in our boys who returned. Something quiet and untouchable. You sensed they knew things they'd never say, did things on the sly you'd never discover. Great cardplayers, those boys, able to bluff with the best, let no joy show in their face no matter what they were holding. A small town is a hard place to keep a secret, and a small southern town with all that heat and all those open windows is an even harder place than most. But those boys who came back from overseas, they seemed to have mastered the trick of privacy. And the way it's always been in this town, you get a sizeable crop of young, hard men coming up at the same time, they sort of set the tone. So, not long after the war, we were a quieter town, a less trusting one (or so some seemed to think), and that's right when tobacco money and textile money reached a sort of critical mass and created construction money and pretty soon there was talk that our small town should maybe get a little bigger, maybe build something that would bring in more tourist dollars than we'd been getting from fireworks and pecans. That's when some folks came up with this Eden Falls idea—a big carnival-type park with roller coasters and water slides and such. Why should all those Yankees spend all their money in Florida? South Carolina had sun too. Had golf courses and grapefruit and no end of KOA campgrounds. So now a little town called Eden was going to have Eden Falls. We were going to be on the map, people said. We were going to be in all the brochures. We were small now, people said, but just you wait. Just you wait. And that's how things stood back then, the year Perkin and Jewel Lut's marriage hit a few bumps and Elgin Bern took up with Shelley Briggs and no one seemed able to hold onto their dogs. The problem with dogs in Eden, South Carolina, was that the owners who bred them bred a lot of them. Or they allowed them to run free where they met up with other dogs of opposite gender and achieved the same result. This wouldn't have been so bad if Eden weren't so close to I-95, and if the dogs weren't in the habit of bolting into traffic and fucking up the bumpers of potential tourists. The mayor, Big Bobby Vargas, went to a mayoral conference up in Beaufort, where the governor made a surprise appearance to tell everyone how pissed off he was about this dog thing. Lot of money being poured into Eden these days, the governor said, lot of steps being taken to change her image, and he for one would be goddamned if a bunch of misbehaving canines was going to mess all that up. "Boys," he'd said, looking Big Bobby Vargas dead in the eye, "they're starting to call this state the Devil's Kennel 'cause of them pooch corpses along the interstate. And I don't know about you-all, but I don't think that's a real pretty name." Big Bobby told Elgin and Blue he'd never heard anyone call it the Devil's Kennel in his life. Heard a lot worse, sure, but never that. Big Bobby said the governor was full of shit. But, being the governor and all, he was sort of entitled. The dogs in Eden had been a problem going back to the twenties and a part-time breeder named J. Mallon Ellenburg who, if his arms weren't up to their elbows in the guts of the tractors and combines he repaired for a living, was usually lashing out at something—his family when they weren't quick enough, his dogs when the family was. J. Mallon Ellenburg's dogs were mixed breeds and mongrels and they ran in packs, as did their offspring, and several generations later, those packs still moved through the Eden night like wolves, their bodies stripped to muscle and gristle, tense and angry, growling in the dark at J. Mallon Ellenburg's ghost. Big Bobby went to the trouble of measuring exactly how much of 95 crossed through Eden, and he came up with 2.8 miles. Not much really, but still an average of .74 dog a day or 4.9 dogs a week. Big Bobby wanted the rest of the state funds the governor was going to be doling out at year's end, and if that meant getting rid of five dogs a week, give or take, then that's what was going to get done. "On the QT," he said to Elgin and Blue, "on the QT, what we going to do, boys, is set up in some trees and shoot every canine who gets within barking distance of that interstate." Elgin didn't much like this "we" stuff. First place, Big Bobby'd said "we" that time in Double O's four years ago. This was before he'd become mayor, when he was nothing more than a county tax assessor who shot pool at Double O's every other night, same as Elgin and Blue. But one night, after Harlan and Chub Uke had roughed him up over a matter of some pocket change, and knowing that neither Elgin nor Blue was too fond of the Uke family either, Big Bobby'd said, "We going to settle those boys' asses tonight," and started running his mouth the minute the brothers entered the bar. Time the smoke cleared, Blue had a broken hand, Harlan and Chub were curled up on the floor, and Elgin's lip was busted. Big Bobby, meanwhile, was . . . Continues... Excerpted from Coronado by Dennis Lehane Copyright ©2006 by Dennis Lehane. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Booklist In this gritty collection of five short stories (only one is new) and a play, Lehane ( Mystic River , 2001) again deploys his singular gifts for creating unique characters and crackling, unforgettable dialogue. In the lurid "Running Out of Dog," Elgin and Blue, two emotionally damaged residents of a small southern town, share a unique bond but run afoul of each other over the affections of sexy Jewel Lut. She has used her good looks and her innate sensuality to entice the town's richest man to marry her, but when her need for security proves to be cold comfort, she unwittingly ignites a deadly confrontation between her two oldest friends. In "Gone Down to Corpus," similar emotions fuel the actions of three high-school football players who destroy the home of a rich teammate after his fumbled catch ruins their shot at a championship and a ticket out of town. In the superb "Coronado," a play based on the short story "Until Gwen," Lehane excels at depicting a soulless con man who would destroy his own son to secure a score. Hair-raising, bloodcurdling crime fiction. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Bookmarks Magazine Dennis Lehane, one of the best crime and literary fiction writers alive today, successfully answered the question most critics asked when eyeing this new collection: Can a novelist write good short stories? The answer here is a resounding yes. Reviewers agree that these stories, some previously published, illustrate Lehane's ample talents in portraying pure evil through character-driven dramas. While "Mushroom" is perhaps the weak link, "Until Gwen" and its companion Coronado , which was produced Off-Broadway last year, received rave reviews. So prioritize your reading accordingly. "And who better to entertain the newcomer to the genre," noted USA Today , "than an author whose stories make us dig deep down into our own hopes and fears." Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Publishers Weekly Tucci, the chameleon character actor and director best known for disappearing entirely into his roles, offers up his bone-dry, world-weary take on Lehane's collection of nonmystery stories. Tucci reads Lehane's somber stories with the greatest subtlety, only occasionally leaving a mark by emphasizing a lone word or leaning into Lehane's prose with a stray vocal twang. Treating Lehane's stories as an actorly challenge rather than an extra paycheck, Tucci gives his reading his all by always holding something back, as if there were other words left unsaid between the lines of what could be articulated. Tucci's fine reading, understated and elegant, is accompanied by a wide-ranging interview with Lehane, in which the author discusses his play Coronado (adapted from the story "Until Gwen," and which gives this collection its title), his feelings about adaptations of his novels and writing for HBO's The Wire. Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Dennis Lehane is the author of ten previous novels—including the New York Times bestsellers Live by Night; Moonlight Mile; Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island ; and The Given Day —as well as Coronado , a collection of short stories and a play. He lives in California with his family. Stanley Tucci's first co-directing, co-screenxadwriting and acting effort was the acclaimed Big Night ; he also wrote, directed and co-produced The Imposters and directed Joe Gould's Secret . Among his many film credits are Deconstructing Harry , A Midsummer Night's Dream , and The Road to Perdition ; he won a Golden Globe and Emmy® for his title performance in HBO's Winchell , and received a Tony® nomination for his performance in Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune . --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more