Low Tide in the Desert: Nevada Stories

Low Tide in the Desert presents eleven lyrically-crafted portraits of the men and women of the gaming worlds of Nevada. They deal and serve, win and lose, in anonymity. In the author's oneiric description of the weaknesses of these laborers, the reader finds their strengths as well. Nevada is one of the characters of these stories. Its aridity and emptiness becomes another magical actor in the mini-dramas of the book. It is set apart from the rest of the world: the East Coast is an alien dream for those who have moved to Nevada; Nevada is another planet for those who have lost a loved-one to it. It is, in any case, a place of death, madness and occasionally redemption. In "Salvage" the desert momentarily becomes again what it once was, an ocean. It offers up the treasure of a great shipwreck as a golden mirage. "The Black Friar of Fremont Street," presents death by degeneracy. The story begins with the protagonist's dream-like memory of growing up with "shoveled snow," "hedges and wallpapered rooms" in proximity to the Atlantic Ocean. It traces a conventional lawyer's first encounter with Las Vegas when his flight was rerouted from a snowed-in Salt Lake City through his growing addiction to gambling to suicide. The story is a graphic thirteen page poem on degradation. This set of stories offers an antidote to the glitzy but vacuous spectacle that advertisers make of Las Vegas. Its describes the casinos of Nevada not as glamorous escape, but as surreal entanglement.