Benni is a young Mexican American artist adrift in a blue-collar Anglo world of dying malls, day-labor jobs, and abandoned buildings. Then he falls in with Tom, the self-proclaimed King of Malls, back from three years in the Marines and carrying a violent streak, and falls for Yuyu, a woman whose search for meaning mirrors his own.
What follows is a slow narrowing. Benni gives up his apartment. He shoplifts, snatches purses, sleeps curled inside department store cabinets. In the newspapers, young men who look a lot like them keep turning up dead. He stays at Tom's side, telling himself he is still the artist and not the thug.
Then, one night, Yuyu and her best friend Trini run for a van in a snowstorm, clutching what they can carry, and are never seen again. The question of what happened to them will follow Benni for the rest of his life.
Part One of Jizo, a novel in three parts, about violence and tenderness, the buried self, and the small stone figures Trini once built from what she found on the ground.
Part Two follows as an ebook, with the complete illustrated print edition in spring 2027.
