Screen Door Jesus & Other Poems

Each savory story is a tasty vignette filled with the flavors of East Texas, piney woods, country folk. None so long as to make you feel over-full. This collection is a thoroughly satisfying way to while away an afternoon.

Christopher Cook may set his stories in a particular region of the country (East Texas, where he was born) but he's a lot more than a regional writer. For one thing, he lives in Europe. These stories really deal with universal human experiences, and they are powerful. They just happen to be expressed (sometimes tragically, sometimes hilariously) through the framework of the Southern fundamentalist culture. Just take a look at this review, which I picked up off the Dallas Morning News web site and agree with 100 percent:The Dallas Morning NewsBook SectionJanuary 6, 2002"Christopher Cook slyly examines religious factions and fractions"By Bryan Woolley/ The Dallas Morning News Early in the title story of Christopher Cook's new collection, the narrator - a 13-year-old Houston boy exiled to his grandparents' house in a small Southeast Texas town for the summer - describes his new cultural environment: "Mostly what they did was religion. A church on every block. Soon as one built up to a hundred members they'd fall into a fight, as if there was some critical mass beyond which people couldn't get along, and they'd form two new churches, like molecular division. Such disputes were said to be doctrinal. But Grandpa observed that if you peeled away that notion and looked underneath, what you'd find was a clash of personalities and American democracy in action." All 10 stories in Mr. Cook's book are set in Bethlehem, a fictional burg in the steamy swamps and forests northeast of Houston. (In his magnificent thriller, "Robbers", published last year, a Texas Ranger pursues two serial killers through this same country.) In all the stories, the people of Bethlehem are "doing religion." Some are practicing a sanctimonious, hypocritical, claustrophobic Main Street fundamentalist piety, a religious expression of narrow small-town minds and lives. Others are doing the Bible-thumping, weeping-and-moaning, hellfire-and-brimstone, washed-in-the-blood fundamentalism practiced in the little white frame Pentecostal and Baptist churches that are tucked amongst the trees along the two-lane highways of the Big Thicket and the Piney Woods. It's a simple and ruthless religion in which Satan is present and angels and demons fly among us. It's a religion in which the Antichrist and/or Jesus Christ may appear at any moment. Neither religion allows for subtle shades of knowledge or interpretation or belief. Neither permits tolerance. Every word of the Bible is literal fact or it's a lie. A sinner is saved and headed for eternal heaven, or he's damned by his unbelief and bound for eternal torture. Both faiths are replete with miracles and curses, punishments and dark emotion. Sometimes they're funny. In "Screen Door Jesus," Mother Harper, while watering her gladiolas, beholds the image of Jesus in her screen door. This miracle, which she perceives at first as a blessing, turns into a curse. In "And I Beheld Another Beast," Veralynn Cunningham surreptitiously has her visiting grand