Under the hard West Texas sky, Josh waits behind the Red Flame counter, the air thick with gasoline and silence. He’s been waiting all his life—for his mother, for a way out, for something more than the wind and dust that never stop moving.
The book earned a coveted Kirkus starred review when it came to us. Izzard Ink focused on the next step—refining the marketing positioning and metadata, rebuilding the files for professional print and eBook distribution, and relaunching the book so that its reach in the marketplace finally matched the level of critical praise it had already earned.
In the cotton towns east of El Paso, a boy named Josh grows up on the edges of other people’s lives—sleeping in a tent by an irrigation ditch, on a barroom cot, and eventually in a back room at the El Paso Red Flame gas station. When his mother drives away and doesn’t come back, survival becomes a matter of odd jobs, careful listening, and sensing when violence is about to break loose.
Across eight linked stories set in the 1950s and ’60s, Josh comes of age in a landscape of dust storms, sheepherders, bar fights, bracero buses, and Friday night football under hard West Texas lights. He falls for a rancher’s daughter who plays Beethoven in a house that smells of cocoa, then for Roble, a sharp, ambitious cowgirl who wants medical school and a life far beyond the valley. He learns how men carry damage from Korea and, later, how he will carry his own—shipping out to Viet Nam and returning with scars, a smuggled Ka-Bar and Colt .45, and the uneasy sense that the only home he’s ever known has moved on without him.
By the time the Red Flame is boarded up and the valley’s farms are thinning out, the town has given Josh a name—El Huerfano—and a choice: stay and accept the narrow life that’s left, or take the long road toward something he can’t yet see.
Told in lean, quietly luminous prose, The El Paso Red Flame Gas Station and Other Stories gathers these small-town dramas into a single, novel-like portrait of a boy no one claimed who keeps trying, against the odds, to claim himself.
Category: Fiction
Release date: June 30, 2022
Page size: 5.5″ x 8.5″
Word count: 41,911
Estimated page count: 162
J. Reeder Archuleta was raised in Texas close to the Mexican Border, and five generations of his family are in their final resting place there. His great-grandfather is buried in Concordia Cemetery in El Paso, Texas, within spitting distance of the grave of John Wesley Hardin.
Archuleta has authored three books: Rio Sonora: A Story of the Arizona Rangers, The El Paso Red Flame Gas Station and Other Stories, and The Best Good Horse.
The result is an atmospheric Texas bildungsroman reminiscent of Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. A well-wrought panorama of small-town dramas and discontents.
The El Paso Red Flame Gas Station is a lovingly rendered portrait of a Texas life by a notable talent.
The El Paso Red Flame Gas Station and Other Short Stories is a thoroughly engaging, visceral collection depicting small-town life in western Texas.
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