Description
Book SynopsisGreetings from Below, a collection of linked short stories, chronicles the life of Nick Danze, a young copy editor who suffers from several “fixations” he believes are associated with some kind of sexual addiction. By day, Nick works for a weekly trade magazine called Footwear Today, while at night he frequents the various striptease bars, massage parlors, and swing clubs of Las Vegas and San Francisco, the two cities in which he lives throughout the book. Most of the stories are set in Las Vegas, where Nick was raised and where his widowed mother still resides, her emotional constitution slowly unraveling as she mourns Nick’s recently deceased father and struggles with addictions of her own: to shopping, gambling, and pure cane sugar. The stories set in San Francisco deal mainly with Nick’s longtime relationship with his girlfriend, Annie, whom he loves but with whom he isn’t in love. Ultimately, through a series of episodes that spans more than twenty-five years, Nick’s life is changed forever when he is forced to confront not just his own predicaments, but his mother’s as well.
Trade ReviewMullins’s rawly confessional debut...follows the plight of self-described coward Nick, from his early sexual awakening and betrayal of a friend in “Arboretum” through the witnessing of his wife’s adulterous encounter in “First Sight.”...His fallibility grates because it feels real, and by the last story the reader is left with an uncomfortable feeling of collusion.
* Publishers Weekly *
Mullins’s impressive debut traces the pivotal moments of Nick Danze’s burgeoning adult life, from his teenage sexual awakenings and his subsequent search for love to his role as helpless witness to his mother’s decline . . . It is a remarkable thing to find a collection of quality, stand-alone stories loosely linked by theme or setting which cohere into a narrative greater than its separate parts.
* ForeWord Reviews *
Greetings from Below carries forward with the inertia of a good novel and ends with an intensity few books can match.
* Prairie Schooner *
Table of Contents
- Arboretum
- Longing to Love You
- A Familiar Place
- Driving Lessons
- Love Versus the Cigar-Store Indian
- Glitter Gulch
- This Life or the Next
- First Sight
- Crash Site on a Desert Mountain Outside Las Vegas
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