Other Shane Hintons

Other Shane Hintons follows eight Shane Hintons (not including the author) through the forking paths of a life, where visceral Florida realism meets the surreal and the absurd. A Christ-haunted childhood manifests in the form of supernatural horrors: a pact with the devil, an encounter with the ghost of a dead friend. Adolescent anxieties resurface in fatherhood, where one Shane Hinton hunts suburban iguanas in an alcoholic stupor, and another waits to die beside his algae-covered swimming pool. Each story marks an inflection point, where decisions cannot be undone, and the Shane Hinton who begins the story emerges a different person. Ten years after his debut collection, Pinkies, which the writer Lidia Yuknavitch described as the "lovechild" of Kafka and Flannery O'Connor, Hinton continues to reveal the terror and beauty of being alive. And as an offspring of those authors, Hinton delivers moments of grace in the strangest places: a childhood friendship with a dead pet goat, life-affirming messages from a swarm of sewer flies, and an uncomfortable conversation with the Other Shane Hinton.