Storylandia 3, The Wapshott Journal of Fiction is pleased to present Dead Girl, Live Boy, a novella by Michelle Brooks. Dead Girl, Live Boy is an unflinching view of a haunted family landscape scattered with undetonated landmines that threaten the characters' fragile existences. Set in a crumbling Detroit as the millennium approaches, Dead Girl, Live Boy calls to mind the works of Hubert Selby Jr. and an urban Tennessee Williams. Brooks creates a darkly comic and claustrophobic world that warrants attention. Both despairing and hopeful, her novella succeeds as both a survivor's story and a cautionary tale.
Storylandia 3, The Wapshott Journal of Fiction is pleased to present Dead Girl, Live Boy, a novella by Michelle Brooks. Dead Girl, Live Boy is an unflinching view of a haunted family landscape scattered with undetonated landmines that threaten the characters' fragile existences. Set in a crumbling Detroit as the millennium approaches, Dead Girl, Live Boy calls to mind the works of Hubert Selby Jr. and an urban Tennessee Williams. Brooks creates a darkly comic and claustrophobic world that warrants attention. Both despairing and hopeful, her novella succeeds as both a survivor's story and a cautionary tale.
Dead Girl, Live Boy is not a novella for the light hearted. You will not find butterflies or daisies or puppies or cute little kittens. What you will find is a city dotted with hope as irony and a survival fashioned from those who gave meaning to grit. Maybe we find there are no true heroes or quite possibly we all are because even as irony hope is still hope found in small spaces amongst the characters of this book.
James R. Tomlinson
I guess what really intrigues me about “Dead Girl, Live Boy” is the imagery and foreshadowing throughout. One such example is the brother’s reaction to Josette’s divorce: ‘Josh hung up on me and sent me an e-mail the next day that had an attachment about a man who’d stabbed his girlfriend and buried her alive. She’d crawled out of her grave and arranged to break into a house and call 911 before passing out.’
Michelle Brooks grew up in Mineral Wells, Texas, a place that is the home of every type of poisonous snake indigenous to the United States. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Iowa Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Orchid, Gargoyle, Hayden's Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, Nerve Cowboy, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, Make Yourself Small, is forthcoming from Backwaters Press in early 2011. In her spare time, she watches the Detroit Pistons, says novenas, and is working on her new project, Motor City Burning Press. She has lived in Detroit since Devil's Night, 1997.
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Overview
Storylandia 3, The Wapshott Journal of Fiction is pleased to present Dead Girl, Live Boy, a novella by Michelle Brooks. Dead Girl, Live Boy is an unflinching view of a haunted family landscape scattered with undetonated landmines that threaten the characters' fragile existences. Set in a crumbling Detroit as the millennium approaches, Dead Girl, Live Boy calls to mind the works of Hubert Selby Jr. and an urban Tennessee Williams. Brooks creates a darkly comic and claustrophobic world that warrants attention. Both despairing and hopeful, her novella succeeds as both a survivor's story and a cautionary tale.