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'Black Light: Stories'
Kimberly King Parsons
Vintage: 224 pages; $15
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"We are sprinkler kids," Kimberly King Parsons writes in one of 12 fantastic stories in her new collection of enchanting yowls from a big and wild Texas. "[S]hoeless and soaked through, blistered and noisy, playing duck-duck-brick while some window mother -- not ours -- yells for us not to get concussed. It is boys versus girls. ... Our teams are pink and peeling, kids willing to do whatever it is we say."
Inside, the men are bad but not all bad. They drink and hunt and have not just one secret bag of cocaine but another. There is poverty and violence and harsh weather. The kids and women endure these men. The women drink too. Their jobs are terrible, with awful bosses and worse lobbies in over-chilled buildings, with seashells under glass and throw pillows the color of vomit. The Texas air crackles. Bugs slink through the cracks in thin-walled houses on the edges of expressways. ("If it's pissed off and lives in a boot," one narrator boasts, "we've got it.")
Parsons' is an...