Praised for its “street-level intimacy” of “
how a community weaves narrative webs to understand their own truths” and as a must-read for lovers of literary crime and noir, Word Is Bone is a story about the people we love, the ones who leave, and the memories that never do.
Excerpt from interview with Erik Deckers about Word Is Bone
Who are some of your influences?
It’s a smattering of musicians with gritty or surreal imagery like Tom Waits, Joanna Newsom, and Van Morrison. Directors obsessed with the streets, too, like Scorcese and Spike Lee. Then there are the authors like Toni Morrison, whose dialogue is fabulous, Raymond Chandler for style, and Roger Zelazny for sci-fi/fantasy that feels real, witty, and has heart. Finally, southern gothic writers really shaped the American grit, gothic, and noir sensibility, like Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and in the west someone like Thomas McGuane who is funny as hell too.
Where did you get the idea?
Since several voices from around the community narrate Word is Bone, so many of the stories are scraps I remember overhearing in the park or at house-parties when I was a teenager. Then, one time later, when I was working for the forest service in northern Arizona, a coworker told me he took the job to get as far from home as possible. He couldn’t stop loving a girl who had moved on to another man who lived just down the street, and I thought, now I have the arc to hang all these neighborhood stories on. A desperate love story can bear the weight of crime, comedy, tragedy, you name it.
Word Is Bone
Winner of the International Latino Book Award
1999. Ex-con June returns to Los Angeles to bury his father, and in the process brings violence and mayhem to everyone he encounters. Low-rent gangsters fight dogs and pistols shoot quiet through potato silencers, and at the center of this sweltering California Gothic and its surreal and colorful cast of characters is the love story of Kiddy and June, two wild young people separated by circumstance and time, trying not to love each other against their better instincts.