Black Light

This debut story collection is a love letter to Texas's most scrappy, beastly, and strange and a paean to characters who dare furiously to dream despite being trapped in places devoid of hope.

This collection is filled with the magic of the mundane. Read and be cowed by the lonely sprawl and grand desolation of Parsons's dusty no-name towns, and with the febrile convictions of the adults and children populating them. Longing, like a desert thirst, claws through these ten stories: for connection, for parenting, for danger, for blood, for love or, if that's too much to ask, merely for the fleeting glow of feeling seen. Because of her depiction of these very human desires, rendered with precise, electric edges throughout, the stories in BLACK LIGHT feel alive. With the electric desperation of Jesus's Son, the haunting atmosphere of The Last Picture Show, and the poetic ferocity of Battleborn, BLACK LIGHT marks the arrival of a writer to watch.