The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez, age 12, lives with his mother, Laurel, and his younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea, an unintentionally man-made body of water in the middle of the Southern California desert. It is a desolate, forgotten place, whose inhabitants thrive amidst seemingly impossible circumstances. Where birds fly by day across the desert sky, by night government fighter planes and helicopters make training runs using live ammunition, and an anonymous dead body floats in from the sea. These events inspire Ares, on the cusp of his adolescence, to enact elaborate fantasies of mortal combat. His membership in a troubled family marks Ares as a casualty of a different kind of war. Malcolm, age 7, is mentally handicapped, and his mother chooses not to do anything about it. Ares' struggle with the burden of responsibility - to himself and to others - draws him into a world of drugs, violence, and sex that he is not prepared for, launching him into a very personal battle for his own identity, one that has a lethal outcome.
Author Biography
Marisa Silver made her fiction debut in The New Yorker when she appeared in the inaugural "Debut Fiction" issue. Her collection of stories, BABE IN PARADISE, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Silver's work has been included in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, and she is also the author of the novel NO DIRECTION HOME. She lives in Los Angeles. Visit her on the Web at www.marisasilver.com.
