In this scary, funny, and slyly political short story collection, Kate McIntyre conjures a fever dream of contemporary Kansas. Boundaries between fantasy and reality blur, and grotesque acts birth strange progeny. A mother must choose between her children and her personal safety when her husband steadily excavates a moat around their country home, his very own little border wall. A Kansas politician grapples with international notoriety after an accident traps salt miners hundreds of feet underground-in the same salt mine where his brother was murdered. A bigot's newly transplanted liver gives him a taste for upbeat 1980s dance tracks while nudging him toward darker plans. And across several stories, we follow Miriam, a young overachiever hell-bent on leaving her home state who is lured back after college to teach elementary school in a rural community. In Culvert, Kansas, Miriam finds closed mouths and big secrets: the toxic waste storage for the battery factory leaches into the soil; the hog farm waste lagoons have sprung leaks; and her students, at turns psychic, lethargic, and aggressive, might not be human.
"The elegantly interconnected stories in Kate McIntyre's Mad Prairie are delightful and imaginative, sometimes strange and sometimes disturbing but always absorbing and beautifully written. With each of these small wonders, McIntyre invites you into the lives of her utterly original characters, people who often find themselves at impossible ends. . . . The intelligence, humor, and charm of these e
Roxane Gay
"Kate McIntyre has a gimlet eye for human failings, especially self-delusion, tempered by true compassion for even her most benighted characters. She's also a wizard at suspense. In every one of these unsettling, hilarious, haunting stories there was a moment when I literally held my breath, afraid of what might happen next, but absolutely compelled to find out. A terrific collection."
Suzanne Berne, winner of the Orange Prize
"Tough wisdom, wicked humor, and a compassionate eye combine to illuminate, like Great Plains lightning, the tricky terrain of Mad Prairie, where the likes of Sherwood Anderson's quietly wounded souls meet up with the likes of Shirley Jackson's off-kilter families. The resulting combustion, magical, mysterious, and always deadly accurate, makes Kate McIntyre's debut collection sizzle."
