Bøger af Brian Allan Skinner

Recently widowed Conor McGuile acquires an antique railcar which he restores and outfits with all the comforts of home. He learns the caboose is haunted by an Indian warrior unjustly accused of robbing a bank courier of a fortune in gold. Conor determines to right the wrong and restore the brave's reputation. Accompanied by his best friend Néall, the pair set sail for New York from Ireland aboard Conor's Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe caboose. Conor intends to visit his grandson Cormac (Mack) in the American Southwest, in New Mexico. The journey across the Atlantic Ocean takes a harrowing two months, during which time the friends land on a fantastic mid-ocean seamount. The sole inhabitant of The Unknown Island reveals astounding secrets and incredible coincidences that will affect Conor and Néall for years to come. Once in the New World, Néall, reconciled with his wife, returns home to Derry, Northern Ireland, while McGuile travels across America. He encounters a trainload of interesting characters, from a runaway bride who reminds Conor of his deceased wife to a ten-year-old boy who wants to adopt the old man as his grandfather. Conor's grandson and his companion, Pedro, abandoned by their parents as teenagers, live in a dilapidated adobe house in Cold Beer, New Mexico. Conor spends a good while disciplining the boys and repairing their tumbledown abode. At last, convinced that the young men are "flying straight," McGuile, homesick, returns to Ireland where the final pieces of his life fall neatly into place and he realizes the beneficial effects he has had upon all whom he met.

"Shoot Me, Jesus" is a "novel in short stories," what writer Jane Lawless called "erotic magic realism with a Southwestern spiciness." Humor is an essential element of each story. The eleven linked tales move forward and backward in time in the manner of flashbacks and foreshadowing in a novel, though the plots are always character-driven. It is their realizations, insights, and inner changes that move the collection along.While the characters retain their essences from story to story, the details of their lives, from their occupations to their sexual proclivities, change with each story. Their identities are malleable, yet who they are remains consistent. They develop by a process of accretion, a slow accumulation of personality traits.The author wondered how things might have turned out for the protagonist if he liked men instead of women, or was poor rather than comfortable. A mere ten seconds can mean the difference between life and death. The smallest event can have enormous repercussions down the road, a kind of "butterfly effect" on a human life. Those are among the concepts explored in this anthology of short stories.

"In the final years of World War II, the Blessed Virgin Mary appears to Roswell, New Mexico, teenagers Antonio and Sixtus. She entrusts them to deliver a letter to a scientist working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. When Antonio's Tio Nicolâas dies, he leaves his house to his nephew and his mejor amigo. Antonio and Six discover their strong physical attraction to each other while wrestling in the Rio Grande. Their erotic love is in conflict with both the teachings of the Church and the norms of society at the time. Through Dr. Richard Feynman, the physicist from Los Alamos, the young men learn of the impending arrival of faraway visitors to whom they will represent Earth as ambassadors. Santa Madre pays the young men several more visits before they enlist in the army in early 1947. Stationed at Roswell Army Air Force Base, they are firsthand witnesses to the famed U.F.O. crash"--