Greetings From Below
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Greetings 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mullins's rawly confessional debut, set mostly in Las Vegas and San Francisco, 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." The death of Nick's father permeates the stories, rendering the boy at age 14 acutely sensitive and eager to be loved, even if it's by the gruff, one-legged bully Travis Kilburg or, later, in "Longing to Love You," by Annie, a San Francisco waitress he doesn't love but marries, anyway, because she gets pregnant. Meanwhile, after the death of his father, Nick's mother slips into a morass of addictions that force a grown Nick to return home in "Glitter Gulch"; he ends up stealing her casino winnings and spending them on a stripper. Nick is plagued with moral-ethical shortcomings, and though it's hard to believe him when he tells his mother, "I'm trying to save your life," his fallibility grates because it feels real, and by the last story, the reader is left with an uncomfortable feeling of collusion.
