Growing Up Dead in Texas

By: Stephen Graham Jones

Narrated by: Joey Collins

Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

It was a fire that could be seen for miles, a fire that split the community, a fire that turned families on each other, a fire that it's still hard to get a straight answer about.

A quarter of a century ago, someone held a match to Greenwood, Texas's cotton. Stephen Graham Jones was 12 that year. What he remembers best, what's stuck with him all this time, is that nobody ever came forward to claim that destruction. And nobody was ever caught. Greenwood just leaned forward into next year’s work, and the year after that, pretending that the fire had never happened. But it had. This fire, it didn't start 25 years ago. It had been smoldering for years by then. And everybody knew it. Getting them to say anything about it's another thing, though.

Now Stephen's going back. His first time back since he graduated high school, and maybe his last. For answers, for closure, for the people who can’t go back. For the ones who never got to leave.

©2012 Stephen Graham Jones (P)2012 Recorded Books

True horror in a small town

This is a hard review to write, which is apt, as I think it was also a hard book to write. My respect to Stephen Graham Jones for persevering through it. I wish he’d narrated the audio version, but I can see why he wouldn’t want to.

If you’ve appreciated Stephen Graham Jones’ fiction, as I have, you’ll appreciate this non-fiction work. It limns the landscape of his growing up so clearly, one will never feel tempted to ask him where he gets his ideas after reading it.

Simultaneously true crime, mystery, autobiography, horror, biography, and investigative journalism, Growing Up Dead in Texas gradually reveals the rot at the heart of his hometown. The number of catastrophic events that originated there are hard to contemplate. Generations of secrets, sacrifices, accidents, and losses twine away from that hidden sickness.

This book is the careful dissection of a town, a small town, in West Texas. Cotton growing country. It’s not sentimental. It’s not always clear cut, either. At the same time, it’s not without sympathy for the people who inhabit it.

These are people just like you and me, and our families, and the people we know. That’s why it’s so horrifying.

If you’re unfamiliar with modern cotton growing, as I was, I recommend a few videos on harvesting and ginning this crop. It’s got a vocabulary all its own, and it’s fascinating. That background makes it easier to follow the narrative.

Like almost all of SGJ’s writing, I highly recommend this, while being hard pressed to describe it. It’s just so well written, readable, and revealing that it simply must be read.

great story

I didn't even mind the reader's lack of accent. great performance and a terrific story.

How actual stories unfold

It is a little bit of work to keep up with the story line but it's also what makes this feel like actually listening to a story being told.
Who wants a liturgy of facts?
This story unfolds in the same way as getting to know a friend, in bits and pieces shared as one can tolerate remembering them. This works well for the complex mystery in this book.