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In one of Melvin Litton’s stories in his latest book of short stories Son of Eve and Other Tales, a still-born child is buried without ceremony in a back yard and foreshadows a murder in an old house years later, maybe in the same place. There is cinematic sudden violence, Kansas-centric tales of careworn nuclear families fierce with promise and love, forbidden darknesses of wind, longing and the chill of regret that seeps through generations. These stories come from the resurrected flatlands of Charlie Starkweather’s ghost. They remind me of the Dirty Realism of Raymond Carver and Carson McCullers, and not to wring the obvious out of a reference, Sam Shepard. Litton is able to scour the horizons of his tales with scathingly simple phrases: (the sun) drops like an empty bottle beyond the tall weeds. The spirit of place is in every story. The final chapter is an eloquent paean to his past working life and his perspective belongs to not only the retiree, but the writer who assembled his bones throughout the long years. He worked construction, he made things, it gave a rhythm and ritual to his life that is reflected in every sentence.
-John Macker, author of Atlas of Wolves (2019) and
The Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected
Poems, 1983-2018 (Finalist for an Arizona/New
Mexico Book Award)
Melvin Litton’s brilliant, eccentric Son of Eve is both transcendent and awash in forbidden depths. There’s a beauty to his language, and also a darkness that at times gives pause; a folksiness that belies the stirring volatility and complexity just beneath the surface. Some phrases stop you with their beauty and insight: ghostly, erratic, yet real as a heartbeat in pause describes a neon sign above a subterranean bar in the title story. In some ways, Litton’s work calls to mind authors as unlike as Allen Ginsberg and Jim Harrison. Idiosyncratic, earthy and unearthly, gorgeous and forbidding, there is no less is more in this collection of stories, only a fearless, and occasionally elegiac telling that will stay with you long after you have closed the book.
-Patricia Traxler, In the Skin (Spartan Press, 2020)
