The Southern Cross – Book review

Skip Horack’s The Southern Cross is an anthology of 16 stories that embody amazing contradictions. They maintain a quiet pace, but their collective emotion is relentless. They are both perverse and poignant. They feel utterly new but take on the scale of tall tales told millions of ways. Geographically, the stories ring the Gulf South, taking place in cities and towns that many in Louisiana know intimately, but Horack always discovers a new angle on the familiar, some startling image or transcendent truth.

Each story centers on a different character, every one drastically different from each other, but all so real that it’s easy to see them interacting if we were only allowed to look in on them a little longer. In her forward to the book, Antonya Nelson says that these characters are all “epic-worthy,” and they are all rich enough for their own novels. But we only see them for a moment, part of a season, as they deal with their families, their jobs, their environments, themselves. The characters linger, however—ghosts in our minds as we move on to the next story.

Winner of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize, the book is sectioned into seasons, four stories to each and beginning with the spring. They are set in the months leading up to Katrina, and the storm is yet another character in the tale.

The Southern Cross is a constellation usually only seen in the Southern hemisphere, and it has captured the attention of wide-ranging cultures, such as the ancient Greeks and Australian aborigines, as well as musicians and videogame creators. In his stories, Horack has created a constellation of people and places that are mundane in their familiarity, but endlessly fascinating as the foundation of new fables.

Horack grew up in Louisiana and practiced law in Baton Rouge. He currently teaches at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco. skiphorack.com