K. L. Cook's debut collection of linked stories spans three generations in the life of one West Texas family. Events both tender and tragic lead to a strange and lovely vision of a world stitched together in tenuous ways as the characters struggle to make sense of their lives amid the shifting boundaries of marriage, family, class and culture. A series of unusual incidents—a daughter's elopement, a sobering holiday trip, a vicious attack by the family dog, a lightning strike—provokes a mother of five to abandon her children. An oil rigger, inspired by sun-induced hallucinations, rescues his estranged wife, who doesn't appreciate his chivalry. In the wake of his father's and brother's deaths, a teenage boy finds a precarious solace working with his mother at a country-western bar. A cosmetics salesman schemes to buy Costa Rica and flirts dangerously with mobsters in Las Vegas. A woman, fleeing her fourth marriage, arrives at a complicated understanding of love and responsibility. Railroad worker and conman, grieving son and battered wife—these characters explore the limits of family fragility and resilience. Their stories—suggesting unlikely connections between comedy and pathos, cruelty and generosity—promise a hard-won dignity and hope.
Reviews
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"They're like something out of a country-and-western song, these Tates of West Texas, what with their good women and bad dogs, bad luck and good honky-tonks. But that's where the song lyric cliche comparison ends. In Cook's hands, the series of linked stories introducing the Tates fairly thrums with keen insight born of uncommon wisdom and unwavering compassion for his characters. From the newly eloped oldest sister to the youngest still in his crib, we meet nearly everyone we need to know in the first of four sections, and the signature events both subtly and powerfully foreshadow what will be revealed in subsequent tales. As each of the Tates takes his or her turn in the spotlight, we come to know a family shaken by violence, overcome by sorrow, and, most of all, driven by a palpable longing for something or someone always just out of reach. Cook's debut collection is a breathtakingly haunting and magical tapestry of human emotions."
Booklist |
"A remarkably accomplished first collection covers 32 years in the life of a fragmented West Texas family. The first four stories ("Easter Weekend," "Nature's Way," "Gone," and "Thrumming") unfold during a few months in 1958. Laura, 14, has an older sister who has recently eloped, an older brother, and two younger brothers. Her father is away for days at a time working in Amarillo, and her mother is restless in a way only Laura seems to notice. The two family dogs, Fay Wray and her daughter Greta, provide some of the more vivid images, particularly when Greta runs off and comes back badly wounded, then gives birth to a litter. Still wild from her own damage, she shreds them with her teeth. Within weeks, Laura's mother runs off, leaving her children without a backward glance. The rest of the volume follows the damaged siblings as they grow older and have children of their own. The exquisite title story is told from the point of view of older sister Gloria's son Travis, who works with her at a bar...after her husband and other son have been killed in a car wreck and her daughter is pregnant with a girl who dies at birth. Travis is both tender and tough as he struggles to protect his mother with wisdom beyond his years. In a stunning feat of telescoping, Cook gives us some later years of estrangement and reconciliation in a matter of a few heartbreaking paragraphs.... Cook is subtle as he illuminates the fragile connections between men and women. A family's tragic trajectory viewed through the kaleidoscope of time in stories that make an immensely satisfying whole."
Kirkus Reviews |
K.L. Cook's debut collection of linked stories, Last Call, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and no wonder: Like the characters and their lives, Cook's writing is ruthless and tender, complex and focused, sad as well as funny. In other words, his book is an engaging reflection of the human condition...From honky-tonk to lyricism, music lives in these stories...and so does wisdom and love tough enough to get kicked but keep getting back up. K. L. Cook's Last Call is a close look at a big-hearted, blundering Texas family. Move over, McMurtry.
San Antonio Express-News |
"Cook understands the intersection between coincidence and insight, and he demonstrates a flair for picking out those random and nonsensical moments—a lightning strike, the return of a vicious dog—that, when paired with a narrator's retrospect, create meaning.... Whether looking forward or back, Cook's narrators know how to read the fringes of their world: they are detectives picking up clues that confirm what they, at heart, already knew, and they use the retrospective lens to add a bit of poetry to their otherwise stark, tough lives.... though independent of the others, each story is relevant enough to the collection's central themes that an unspoken back story lingers, and...a history is built that mimics that of the family it portrays: fragmented and drifting, yet tenuously anchored to a larger whole."
Colorado Review |