Description: This clever adaptation of the short-story cycle is like a weaving where characters pass first as warp-setting the stage, then weft- elaborating their histories and motives. The reader meets again a character from a previous story, with more revelation through widening circumstances.
Review Quotes:
Only narrative wizardry could alchemically transform dead dogs, decaying feral cats, shifting patronymics, and generations of genetic and self-made bastards into gorgeous literature. Yet this is precisely what these three masters of the short story have done in Dancing on Barbed Wire. The stories are so exquisitely crafted and ingeniously interconnected that they appear to be unrehearsed, spontaneous tales, a delight for readers and a despair for critics eager to pounce on any disqualifying faults. There is none. These stories are Texas prime; set in a lesser human and natural geography, they would be merely grotesque, unconvincing imitations. In the unforgiving Texas dust, scrub, toil, and trouble, they are metaphorically summarized by gut-ripping barbed wire and soul-refreshing blue bonnets. Here are people fallen so low that they can give good advice and so tough that they can be tender. To the cadence of country-western music we meet them time and again as they circle around the vast Jericho that is Texas until the walls crumble and we come see them as they are: people as spiritually and physically bent out of shape as a Picasso painting, yet still coherent and perhaps not greatly unlike ourselves. Superbly conceived and faultlessly edited, Dancing on Barbed Wire takes its well-deserved place at the head of its class.
--Harold Raley, author of Lost River Anthology and Louisiana Rogue