cover image In an Arid Land: Thirteen Stories of Texas

In an Arid Land: Thirteen Stories of Texas

Paul Scott Malone. Texas Christian University Press, $21.5 (232pp) ISBN 978-0-87565-140-8

The voice of each character in Malone's debut echoes with a sense of place, whether it's the woods of East Texas or the suburbs of Houston. Malone, however, hasn't quite found a narrative voice of his own to bring these characters to full life. Each of the stories concerns at least one family relationship: unreconciled parents and children in ``The Unyielding Silence''; absent husbands and long-suffering wives in ``Bringing Joboy Back''; estranged siblings in ``Prize Rope'' and the title story. These are restrained stories, and Malone compresses the personal histories of his protagonists rather than incorporating them into his narratives. He tends to rely on overly heavy metaphors: one character's vanished husband juxtaposed with another's fading memory of a missing piece of jewelry in ``The Lost Earring''; the rustic talisman of ``The Sulfur-Colored Stone''; miscommunication between brothers during a fishing trip in ``Floundering.'' Although peopled with solid characters and scattered with plenty of significant objects, most of these tales are too dry for their drama to take root. (Apr.)