![]() It is always a difficult task for a writer to take a step back and across like that, and the result can often seem stilted and mannered. The first story, ‘Jarabe’, is set on the debatable early nineteenth-century border between Mexico and Texas, and the writer has to find some way to convey, in modern English, the flow of Mexican Spanish at that time. ![]() Having been captivated before by his short stories, especially one from his earlier collection, Where There Is Ruin, where someone keeps returning to a spot in the woods where a beautiful body is decomposing over time, I was only too eager to read his latest collection. There is also a hint of modernism in his short stories, the medium within which he works at his best, inasmuch as there is often not so much a resolution to them as a sense of moving onwards, as though peace and kensho are the next step, or the one after next. ![]() His unique style may be compared to that of Cormac McCarthy, but with an added baroque touch, a sense of wonder and of the phenomenal within the experience of each moment. ![]() ![]() His debut novel Hagridden was a re-working of Kaneto Shindo’s movie Onibaba, transposed to the bayous of Louisiana during the chaos of the American Civil War, but with extra forces of nature and supposed super-nature working upon it. Sam Snoek-Brown is one of those under-the-radar writers who deserve more attention. ![]()
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