Incarnations

A collection of short stories detailing the lonely lives of drunks and killers. Navigating the deserts of Mexico to the backwoods of North Carolina, our narrators tell their stories in hauntingly poetic voices reminiscent of William Gay and Cormac McCarthy. INCARNATIONS is a bold collection, a series of short letters to a god that has long since abandoned this world. Chris Deal’s stories are family secrets, stolen conversations, personal apocalypses, violent acts of desperation, songs to be rediscovered. Sometimes the stories are as big and scary as the dark depths of the ocean and sometimes they are as quiet as whispered regret. Deal fearlessly commits to his vision, so much so, one gets the sense that each and every story in Incarnations represents a hard-earned chunk of Deal’s big, dark heart. -Paul Tremblay, author of THE LITTLE SLEEP In the tapestries that Chris Deal weaves, the weight of emotion becomes physical, lands unfurl into the darkness, and hope is dealt in back alleyways like a forbidden drug. Sometimes poetic, sometimes gritty, Incarnations is a nesting doll, each layer that much more skin flayed, your bruised heart lurking at the center. -Richard Thomas, author of STARING INTO THE ABYSS Like the violent narrative flashes of Brian Evenson or the poetic interludes of Hemingway’s In Our Time, Chris Deal’s new collection summons fever-dream worlds in shades of bright crimson and gunmetal gray. These stories are beauty and terror incarnate. Read them and see. -Aaron Gwyn, author of WYNNE’S WAR and DOG ON THE CROSS