The 1994 Iowa Short Fiction Award-winner, Moore's first collection makes a fine debut with its seven stories of the shifting California-Mexico borderlands. The characters are ordinary, slightly vague people who have lost their bearings in the indeterminate landscape of agribusiness farms, pre-fab factories and desert highways: a middle-aged policeman revisiting a disappointingly unexotic Baja in ``Grimshaw's Mexico''; a young Mexican teacher fleeing to California from her widowed mother's remarriage in ``Planet of the Evangelists''; or callow 20-somethings trying to get along as roommates or traveling companions in ``Miss Mustachioed Bat'' and ``An Aztec Sphinx.'' The tales are small-scale tragedies of misunderstandings and vague longings in the Raymond Carver school. In the title story, a midnight dry-ice delivery run strings together the conversational fumbles of the young delivery driver, a hitchhiker and an all-night waitress, which end in a foolish accident. Despite Moore's attention to atmosphere, his hazy Mexican local color is ill-suited to his ironic distance and his all-American short-story approach. His stories are well-crafted but their slightly closed structures and themes have some of the rough edges and visible artifice of workshop work. (Nov.)
A set of short stories (seven in all) which really deserved to win the 1994 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Set in fictional towns along highways and in industries on either side of the Mexico-California border, the stories take place in a defamiliarized zone of subtle misplacements and cultural contretemps. Moore's tales perceptively explore the fluidity of the border between north and south, sameness and difference, stasis and motion. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
