The El Paso Red Flame Gas Station and Other Stories<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nDog Ear Publishing<\/p>\n
Paperback, 978-1-4575-5919-8 (also available as an e-book), 132 pages, $9.99<\/p>\n
December 2017<\/p>\n
Where most of us might see only dry, windy, hardscrabble land,<\/span> Far West Texas native J. Reeder Archuleta<\/span> can see beauty. Of course, it’s beauty that can turn harsh and unforgiving if you forget to pay much attention to the vast sky sweeping overhead.<\/p>\nLikewise, we might notice a few weathered, seemingly nondescript people if we stopped for gas in a small town near the Texas\u2013New Mexico border. Archuleta, however, would see human stories spanning much of life\u2019s emotions and experiences.<\/p>\n
The El Paso Red Flame Gas Station and Other Stories,<\/span> Archuleta’s second book, is an absorbing coming-of-age tale that unfolds within a collection of eight short stories. Set in the 1950s and \u201960s, in a small town that is not named, the stories have changing viewpoints and changing casts of interconnected characters. Yet one figure is present in each story \u2014 an abandoned child named Josh, who grows into manhood over the course of this well-written collection.<\/p>\nJosh sometimes is a story\u2019s central character. Other times, he is mentioned in somebody\u2019s conversation. Or, he is one of several observers witnessing a tense, dramatic, or violent between two or more townspeople. Yet each appearance helps reveal more of the young man the abandoned boy will become.<\/p>\n
During the 1950s, Josh\u2019s mother has left him sitting on a bench outside of a bar, the Cotton Club Saloon, and promised to return for him later that day. Instead, she flees, and Josh is taken in and given a cot in a back room of the bar. There, he grows up, watched over by several of the bar regulars, including a Korean War veteran named Rip O\u2019Leary. Josh does his schoolwork while sitting at the bar, and he runs errands for the bar\u2019s owner and others.<\/p>\n
In one story, Rip reflects on Josh\u2019s hard childhood, impressed that \u201cthe boy never complained and never asked for anything except work, so he could earn his own way\u201d and how he \u201cwould not stop working until he was told to.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once Josh is in high school, he becomes a star linebacker and pass receiver on the football team, and he begins dealing with the complexities of trying to have a girlfriend. Here, it becomes easy for readers to start sensing echoes of Larry McMurtry\u2019s<\/span> classic small-town Texas novel, The Last Picture Show.<\/span> Yet, Archuleta has his own voice. And he is very good at describing West Texas people, how they speak, and how their stark surroundings can both shape their lives and tear them down. Some of his scenes and descriptions, such as that of a dust devil gathering strength and debris and swirling into town, may linger in readers\u2019 minds for a long time.<\/p>\nThe book\u2019s only noteworthy flaws are about a dozen or so typos involving punctuation, capitalization, or missing quotation marks. These are not significantly distracting, but careful proofreading seems to be a lost art among publishers these days.<\/p>\n
In The El Paso Red Flame Gas Station and Other Stories,<\/span> Josh gains some new maturities while fighting in the Vietnam War. And those new strengths are put to the test again, once he returns home to a changing town that has almost abandoned him during his absence.<\/p>\nJ. Reeder Archuleta wisely has left this book\u2019s pathways open for a sequel story collection or a spinoff novel. Add him to your list of writers to watch.<\/p>\n
* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lone Star Book Reviews of Texas books appear weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com LITERARY FICTION J. Reeder Archuleta The El Paso Red…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}